It’s not all doom and gloom, you know. This is the first financial quarter since the Eurozone’s economic crash in which we have seen signs of recovery reflected in a gradually stabilising adspend. The global adspend may have risen by 3.5%, but this growth would be even more significant with a financially healthy Eurozone behind it. Instead adspend in Western and Central Europe dropped by 0.5% in 2012 and is predicted by ZenithOptimedia’s Advertising Expenditure Forecasts to drop by 0.8% in 2013.
However, there may be light at the end of the economic tunnel for the Eurozone’s advertisers. With signs of recovery in 2013, it is thought that adspend may well begin to pick up by 2% in both 2014 and 2015. This is a modest prediction, but it could spell the end of the long dark years of horribly tight marketing budgets across the UK, France, Germany and much of Northern and Central Europe.
Time to join the party…
This predicted growth is nothing on the burgeoning adspend seen in the world’s rising markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs). Concerns have been voiced recently; that the boom times for these flourishing countries could well be short lived. It was feared that their growth was unsustainable, but after a small slowdown, these fears seem unfounded.
This is reflected in BRICs’ adspend and the predictions which ZenithOptimedia have in store for them. Scrapping BRICs 7.0% growth estimate, the forecast now suggests that these rising markets will see a significant 7.6% rise in advertising spending in 2014.
The Middle East remains strong despite tensions
Events and violence in Egypt and Syria have not significantly impacted the forecast for the Middle East’s adspend growth, despite the fact that Egypt’s forecasted 3.9% rise has now been revised to a decline of 6.3%. This has influenced the Middle East’s original predicted adspend growth of 5.5% growth, but will only reduce the estimate to 4.8%.
What about the online world?
So now you know where the world is at with advertising spending, it’s time to answer the one question us digital marketers really care about. How much adspend will be going on digital marketing?
Here is one area that is growing all over the world, irrespective of economic trouble and political violence. Digital adspend (via desktop and mobile) made up 18.3% of all adspend in 2012. It is predicted to reach 20.4% in 2013 and 24.6% in 2014.
Mobile is likely to be one of the biggest growth areas. A 77% growth in mobile advertising is expected in 2013. It looks like this really could be the year mobile starts being taken seriously. 56% growth and 48% growth are then expected in 2014 and 2015 respectively.
This is big news for online marketers and is a real indication that it’s time to get mobile advertising strategies sorted, properly. Whether that involves creating new ad formats, implementing better measurement of web use via mobile or adding click-to-call buttons to search results, advertisers everywhere had better start thinking hard about mobile.
So what do the experts make of it all? Acoording to ZenithOptimedia’s CEO Steve Kind: “The stability of global adspend growth this year – a year without big events like the Olympics and US elections – shows that the advertising recovery is on track, promising even stronger growth in 2014 and 2015. The increasing penetration of mobile handsets is playing a key role in driving advertising growth across the world.”
