THE AGE OF big-budget TV commercials is slowly coming to an end as internet ads take over as the target of advertisers’ money.
This year, the online advertising sector is expected to overtake TV as the biggest market in Ireland for the first time.
According to the most-recent media outlook from Core Media, Ireland’s biggest ad buyer and communications agency, internet ads will be worth about 30% of the estimated €795 million industry in 2015 – compared to 1% a decade ago.
Today the company announced it was hiring 20 new staff under a “major expansion” of its digital and data business – which now accounts for 40% of its revenue.
Core Media’s digital and data officer, Justin Cullen, told TheJournal.ie the change was forcing the group to look for people with very different skills to those in demand only a few years ago.
Social media is becoming a much, much bigger part of our business and the data side is a part that’s relatively new,” he said. ”We are bringing in people with a high level of mathematics and data science capabilities.”
The mobile revolution
In the US, where TV ads are still the number-one destination for advertising dollars, PriceWaterhouseCoopers has predicted online ads would assume top place within four years.
The vast majority of that growth will come in mobile ads, which are forecast to grow nearly fourfold from last year’s figure to be worth almost $40 billion in 2019.
Companies like Facebook typify that trend. Just two years ago, mobile ads made up only 30% of its revenues, but by the first three months of this year the share had grown to 73%.
Together with Google, it made up almost 60% of global mobile advertising revenues last year, according to eMarketer. At its most simple, that change comes down to the amount of time consumers spend on the internet and the ever-increasing preference for mobile devices.
Cullen said advertisers also liked digital media because they offered “hard data”, although it was easy to have the misconception traditional ads weren’t effective because there were no clicks or “likes” to use as a gauge.
“We spend a lot of time looking at campaign effectiveness,” he said. “For a number of companies, we have seen that TV advertising will drive search queries and those search queries will deliver better results when they come from TV advertising.”
In the future, Cullen expected advertising data would become “live and predictive” and that meant companies would be able to instantly tweak their campaigns based on customers’ reactions almost instantaneously. We’ve come a long way.
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