I regularly skim research published by Nielsen. I find their work very insightful and reliable. However, their recent research — indicating a very low Internet ad spend ($6 billion in 2011) was alarming to me. So, I decided to dig a bit deeper to understand advertising spend across media types in the U.S. This resulted in the infographic below.
The U.S. advertising market grew by three percent YOY in 2011 reaching approximately $165 billion. Cable TV, Internet search, magazines, out of home media, digital video and mobile media types experienced growth in ad revenue in 2011. The media types that experienced a decline in ad revenue in 2011 were newspaper, radio, and broadcast TV. Broadcast TV took a hit and only brought in $38.5 billion in ad revenue, a decline of 16.6 percent in 2011.
U.S. consumers’ appetite for television continues to make TV the largest receiver of ad dollars in the U.S. In 2011 a total of $68.5 billion was spent on cable and broadcast TV together.
While TV is dominating ad spend in the U.S., internet advertising is growing fast. It grew by 22 percent in 2011 to $31.7 billion. Mobile advertising is the fastest growing ad format in Internet advertising. Mobile advertising in the US reached $1.6 billion during 2011 from $640 million the year before, an increase of 149%.
I think most people see TV ads as interruptions (to their favourite shows), but view online viral video ads in a more favorable light. Two recent memorable online video ads that I have stumbled into are by Samsung and Dollar Shave Club. Feel free to post a link to ads that got your attention recently along with your thoughts on the infographic in the comment section below.
