Thursday, January 22, 2015

Ad Spend & The Continued Rise of Digital Marketing

First blog post ever - here we go!

Here is the link that I found on TechCrunch which goes through projections for 2015 ad spend and much like we heard in class, Digital continues to be the fastest growing and is now close to making up one third of total ad spending (http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/2015-ad-spend-rises-to-187b-digital-inches-closer-to-one-third-of-it/).

I have also seen numerous articles on ad-based start-ups raising a decent amount of money either running ad spend platforms, advertising analytics, or ad exchanges.  Clearly this is a growth area and it is garnering a lot attention both from the marketing world and VC world.  From an outsiders perspective (and I am a complete outsider), digital advertising appears to be extremely competitive and I wonder about how profitable some of these businesses are despite processing billions of dollars of ad spend for companies.   I also wonder why the companies themselves don't build out this functionality themselves within their marketing departments.  Perhaps the spend would be too large and you might get pigeon-holed with just your own team that you miss broader industry trends / movement but this seems like something companies could end up bringing in house no?

In any case, digital ad spending is not going away and the technology appears to only be getting better. I just wonder how the economics work and would love to know how the companies paying these digital advertising cos view the space and its future.  Something I will be sure to bring up in class this weekend.

No comments: