81 per cent of marketers plan to boost spending online
Matt Hartley
Sun
The recession has forced marketers to rethink how they’re divvying up their advertising budgets, allocating more money than ever to digital marketing, a new survey shows.
Thanks to improvements in technology, the economic downturn and increasing demand from their audiences, 81 per cent of marketers said they planned to increase their spending online, while 49 per cent said they expected to boost what they were shelling out for mobile marketing on cellphones and smartphones, according to a Media Mix survey from Ipsos Reid, presented Wednesday at Marketing Week’s Digital Day conference in Toronto.
“We’re seeing a shuffle in the deck,” said Steve Levy, head of Eastern Canada market research for Ipsos Reid, who added that the survey’s results were more of a barometer for looking at the year ahead rather than in the rearview mirror. “We’ve been seeing a shuffle in the deck for some time, but it seems like it’s gaining pace.”
Advertisers said they planned to cut their spending on traditional media in the coming year, with 41 per cent of advertisers expecting to cut back on print marketing, while 26 per cent anticipated slashing their spending on radio ads and 22 per cent planned to pare back their television advertising budgets.
“In a lot of senses, the tough economy has been pretty good for digital marketers,” said Adrian Capobianco, president of Toronto marketing firm Quizative Inc. “The tough economy has challenged inertia. Everything is being evaluated. New things are being evaluated and what you’ve done for the last 10 years is being evaluated in the same way. The dollars are shifting.”
Ipsos Reid conducted the Media Mix survey in early September in conjunction with the Canadian Marketing Association and Marketing magazine, polling 540 Canadian marketers and agencies.
In a separate survey, Ipsos Reid found that Canadians are warming up to Twitter, but that the social-networking phenomenon has a long way to go before it reaches Facebook-like levels of familiarity.
About nine out of 10 Canadians have heard of Twitter, up from just 26 per cent of Canadians who were aware of Twitter back in March, according to the survey, unveiled at the conference.
However, only five per cent of Canadians say they are active users of the micro-blogging service, where users can post updates about what they’re doing in 140 characters or less. Still, that’s up from the estimated one per cent of Canadians who were using Twitter in March.
“If Facebook is mainstream, Twitter certainly is not,” Levy said. “It’s not uncommon that sometimes there is a gulf between what people know about, or more importantly what they think they know about, and what they do.”
Although Twitter has experienced meteoric growth over the past 18 months — the site boasted nearly 60 million worldwide visitors in September, according to ComScore Inc. — it still trails Facebook’s estimated 325 million global users. In Canada alone, there are more than 12 million Facebook users.
While Canadians are increasingly embracing the Web and social media, advertisers are still figuring out how to market to them online.
Although more than $1.6 billion was spent in Canada on online marketing in 2008, marketers only allotted 11 per cent of their overall budgets to Internet advertising, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada.
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