Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $77 Billion By 2016

By Shar VanBoskirk

By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing – as much as they do on television today.  Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will grow to 35% of all advertising spend within the next five years.

What does this growth mean for you?

1)      Interactive media has gained legitimacy in the marketing mix. In past forecasts, we found that interactive budgets grew because of marketing experiments, or firms looking for lower-cost alternatives to traditional media. No more. The next five years of growth comes from bigger interactive teams spending sizably to bake emerging media into their strategies for creating rich customer relationships.

2)      Search’s share will shrink. Search marketing (paid search and SEO) will continue to own the largest portion of the interactive marketing pie. But its overall share will decline as marketers shift search spend into biddable display investments, mobile marketing, and even social media.

3)      Display media will rally. Bolstered by advances in audience targeting and bid-based buying approaches, advertisers will renew their love affair with display media. We expect display investments to grow as marketers apply display instead of search. And niche or remnant inventory sells for higher prices due to demand-driven pricing.

4)      Mobile spend will surpass email and social media – this year. Mobile has the steepest growth curve in our study; spend in mobile ads and search will pass that in email marketing or social media this year. Email actually paces at a healthy 10% compound annual growth rate over the next 10 years. But the rapid adoption of tablets and their associated new and pricey ad formats will bolster mobile marketing investment.

5)      Social media marketing will grows moderately. Our social media forecast includes money spent a) integrated social media campaigns – think advertising efforts that could not exist without social networks, like Facebook gifts, or sponsored conversations; b) with agencies to develop social assets; or c) to buy social media management technologies like a listening platform.  But none of these investments are actually very expensive. So even though marketer curiosity about social media remains high, social media marketing spend is comparatively conservative.

How does this growth resonate with your own budget plans. I’m sure you’ll want to review the full report for the data and detail behind each of the above headlines. And you can manipulate our detailed models through ForecastView.

Shar VanBoskirk is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving interactive marketing professionals. Follow her on twitter @SharVanBoskirk.

Share and Enjoy

Subaru Bows Facebook Cause-Marketing Program

Subaru is launching a Facebook campaign that encourages people to choose a charity for the automaker to partner with in this fourth annual Subaru Share the Love event.

The automaker, which launched the program in 2007, said it has donated $15 million to charities, and plans to donate $20 million this year.

The program gives $250 for every new Subaru vehicle sold or leased from Nov. 19 through Jan. 3. What’s new is that the Facebook voting program allows Facebook fans of Subaru to vote for a “People’s Choice” charity, per the Cherry Hill, N.J. company.

Teach For America, The American Red Cross, The Children’s Miracle Network, and The Make-A-Wish Foundation are the four charities people can vote for.

Brian Johnson, national advertising manager for Subaru of America, Inc., said the program enables customers to “get directly involved with our partners and allows them to have a say in who Subaru partners with.”

The online voting, which started Thursday and runs through Sept. 15, is being hosted on the Subaru of America Facebook page. The charity that receives the most votes will be the fifth charity partner. For the first 200,000 votes, Subaru will donate 10 cents per vote to the charity receiving the vote.

While the automaker saw about a 9.3% drop in U.S. sales last month versus 2010, the company — which had a huge 2010 (when it posted record sales and a 21.8% increase versus 2009) — is still on a positive trend year-to-date. Subaru reported that year-to-date sales were up 2.56% through July. But that is still pretty far removed from the stellar 50% increase in sales since 2009, while the rest of the market overall had been in a slump.

One challenge for Subaru is Impreza, which has lagged its traditional strong suit of Forester and Outback. Expect a big push for the 2012 version of the car, which comes to market in November. The automaker said that it is holding the MSRP at the 2010 price of $17,495 for the base model.

 

Share and Enjoy