TV Ads To Take Hit As Big Brands Anticipate Online Budgets
Big name-brand
marketers are fed up with traditional media channels and are
threatening to shift the lion�s share of their budgets online,
according to Nick Brien, worldwide CEO of Universal McCann.
�If this
happens for another year, significant clients will want to walk,�
Brien said at an Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in
reference to a general climate of discontent due to increasing
viewer fragmentation, disruptive technologies, and the resulting
decrease in ROI (return on invested capital). Without naming any
specific clients, Brien added they are �just waiting to increase
their online spend to 50% or 60% [of their total budgets].�
According to
eMarketer projections, web advertising as a share of total ad spend
will reach 7.4% this year, more than 10% by 2009, and at least 13.3%
by the end of 2011. �Shifts among marketers away from traditional
media would make U.S. advertising growth flat-line without the
Internet,� said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.
The increased
spending on online ads is coming from a mix of additional
allocations and budget shifts from other media, and TV may be in for
the greatest losses. Among the largest companies, 42.4% of marketing
executives recently told BusinessWeek that TV would take the
biggest hit in ad budgets in the next few years.
Brien also took
a moment to dispute statements made recently by Maurice L�vy,
chairman and chief executive of Publicis, to the effect that the
industry was approaching the kind of hyper-inflated economics that
led to the so-called dot-com crash in 2000/2001.
�He doesn�t
give enough credit to the serious ad dollars being redirected to
growing audiences online,� Brien says of L�vy. And at the end of the
day, a solid brand is still one of the �most valued and most
exciting mechanisms� a marketer can possess, Brien notes.
That notion was
seconded by Brad Brinegar, chairman and CEO of Havas� McKinney, who
described a brand as �that most valuable asset.� Brinegar predicts
that over 50% of McKinney�s business will be digital in less than
two years. �But don�t talk about how interactive [digital] is a way
to do something cheap,� he says. �To do it right costs money. It�s
just allocated in different ways.�
