Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Advertising Spend Trends for Social Media and Mobile Marketing

I stumbled upon this interesting article titled, "The Rise and Fall of Advertising Media" that relays insightful metrics for social media through several powerful info-graphics:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2OcxfF/tag.microsoft.com/community/blog/t/the_rise_and_fall_of_advertising_media.aspx

Three key takeaways for me:

1. Mobile marketing and social media advertising spend are on a precipitous growth trajectory, 75% Y/Y as compared to 2009 and 32% Y/Y respectively. To put things in perspective, there are an average of 1,000,000 new iOS and Android devices activated daily which means that in less than one year the mobile market will more than double from 350,000,000 users to 715,000,000 users.

2. Independent of the exponential growth of social media, advertising spend is *dominated* by television which is also growing at 11% Y/Y. Television advertising spend is $70 billion as compared to approximately $2 billion on social media and mobile marketing, a comparison that seems to point to poor investment. Considering that the average television commercial is less than 30 seconds while the average website session is 1 minute and the average mobile application session is 4.3 minutes, it would seem that consumers would develop greater brand presence and ultimately purchase more through increased advertising spend on the later two sources. It would be interesting to see what the return on investment is on these various sources of advertising spend.

3. I think the article highlights where advertising spend is being sourced today but overlooks where the resultant revenue is coming from. What further amplifies the power of social media and mobile advertising is the networking principle. Whereas a Superbowl commercial may reach a target viewing audience of 1,000,000 people, a social media campaign can yield 1,000,000 fans and evangelists who then can propagate marketing collateral, reviews, and shares that can reach an expanded network of multiples of a million. Ads can become viral and the return on investment can be explosive.

The infographics were helpful for me, and I look forward to seeing more quantitative metrics that can inform future advertising spend decisions.

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