What is the future of advertising?

money-marketuk.com/

• Email

The long decline in print readership has led many to declare that print press will be dead in a few years.

Last year, we became the first country where digital media took a 50 per cent share of advertising spending.

These are hard times for the newspaper industry. The long decline in print readership has led many to declare that print press will be dead in a few years. Digital advertising is rising, with online advertising now taking more than $2 of every $10 spent on all advertising in the US, according to Forbes.

It has become clear that digital marketing has outgrown the internet. With the proliferation of social networks and network-enabled devices, we are increasingly becoming connected when making daily decisions and this has led to the creation of new spaces for advertisers, it’s also no longer just about banners and websites.
In the UK, official figures show that in 2015 the value of the print advertising market went down to unprecedented levels of as much as 30 per cent in some weeks, with most of the UK’s top 10 newspaper advertisers having stripped their budgets.

Alongside this news eMarketer announced that last year, the UK became the first country in the world where digital media took a 50 per cent share of advertising spending.

Drive to digital sends UK industry to its highest growth for four years

Data also indicated that year-on-year digital advertising has increased at around 30 per cent.  According to the Advertising Association/Warc, UK advertising grew at its highest rate since 2010 last year, increasing 5.8 per cent to £18.6 billion. This strong growth is forecast to continue, with adspend? Is this a company, if so give it a capital letter, if not then put ‘with expenditure on advertising’ predicted to break the £20bn barrier in 2016.

“It is a significant moment for the ad industry, and digital’s dominance is particularly interesting when compared with the global splits” declared Bill Fisher, analyst at eMarketer. “The UK ad market is notable for its aggressive embrace of online advertising and its rapid adoption of mobile advertising. Because so much TV and radio programming appears ad-free in the UK, the comparative spending on digital channels has always been high”.

The biggest casualty of the surge in UK digital advertising has been traditional print media, with newspapers and magazines struggling to hold on to their market share. Last year, print advertising spending in the country fell 3.9 per cent to less than £2.7 billion.

The Independent

One clear example of this trend is the case of The Independent newspaper, which ceased its printed edition in March, leaving only an online edition. Launched in 1968, at its peak The Independent sold around 428,000 copies a day. Twenty-five years later, the number of copies being sold on weekdays became closer to 28,000.

The co-founder of The Independent, Stephen Glover, said the paper was selling “so few copies that it doesn’t really make sense to go on printing it every day”. He said the Financial Times and the Guardian could also stop producing print editions “within the next few years”, and in 10 to 15 years there would not be “very many” printed newspapers. The Times’ media editor Beth Rigby told the BBC that the industry had been in turmoil for many years, “and now we’re beginning to see the hard end of that”