Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In summary, here are the key takeaways from the infographic below that tells us the latest shifts in digital advertising this 2017:

• Increased usage of mobile ad blockers
• Increased monetization of Google AMP and Facebook
• Instant Articles
• Revenue on desktop advertising will continue to level down; Mobile advertising will experience massive growth
• Google and Facebook continues to be the most utilized platform in digital advertising
• Programmatic advertising will gain more popularity
• Outstream videos will gain more popularity
• Increased utilization of Chatbots....

Our industry faces a well-known duopoly, with Facebook and Google commanding an ever-increasing share of digital ad spend, both in the U.S. and globally. I recently dug into the data and forecasts available, to better quantify (for my own benefit and hopefully yours!) just how much Facebook and Google are eating digital.

Global ad spend, across all channels (digital, TV, print, radio, outdoor, etc.) is growing annually on average by 5.6 percent from 2015 to 2020, and will reach $674 Billion from $513 Billion in 2015.

The U.S. market will represent 35 percent of the global ad market, reaching $234 Billion by 2020 with a slightly slower growth rate compared to the global average, at 5.0 percent from 2015 to 2020. This is expected as rapidly developing markets in the East and a growing middle class represent new markets on which advertisers can focus.

45% Of U.S. Ad Spend Will Be Digital
33 percent of ad spend in the U.S. was digital last year and that is expected to reach 45 percent by 2020. In real numbers, that’s a $60-billion market growing to $105-billion, with a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.9 percent.

The growth of digital is more than 2 times higher than the growth of the overall ad market, which represents a tremendous opportunity for digital businesses. More people are accessing content online and more advertisers are spending their budgets online. Will the rising tide lift all ships?...

I've lived and breathed and thought about this space every single day, and here's the sad conclusion I've arrived at: digital display advertising doesn't work.

I think it's safe to say that digital display advertising has never lived up to the promise and the hype. Since the very beginning, advertisers have been obsessed with finding ways to get people to click on their ads. They've worked with an array of ad creation platforms and embraced programmatic methods so that the right ads get in front of the right people, and yet the click-through average across all platforms and methodologies is .06 percent.

This means that for every 1,000 times an ad is shown, it is clicked on only .6 times. This means that for the average digital display campaign to get a single click, it needs to be served 1,800 times....