Each week, NDA Editor Justin Pearse will be casting his eye over some of the week’s more important industry stories and highlights must-read articles you may have missed
Life may still be uncertain but if you talk to enough people in the industry there is no doubt a sense of cautious optimism can be detected. The green shoots may be small but at least they’re starting to appear.
As a story on WARC this week points out, while new figures form the IAB warn that traditional media spending will fall by 30% this year, digital media will rise by 6%. Under the welcome headline Light at the end of the tunnel, the IAB’s Advertising Impact Survey, looking at spend for 2020 and estimates for next year, is worth digging into. Highlight include paid search up 26%, social up 25% and CTV up 19%.
As Warc points out “The picture for 2021, meanwhile, remains uncertain. Just 9% of buyers indicated that they have clearly defined budgets for next year while 70% are not clear or have ballpark estimates at best. But among those with a view, spend is expected to increase by 5.3%.”
In more heartening news, as a story on Adweek reveals, programmatic ad spend is returning to pre-pandemic levels. According to new data out from MediaRadar programmatic ad spend is up 36% this year, with the number of advertisers running programmatic ads up 36% since January, a nice change from April when spend was down 9%.
Confidence may well be returning to the market but that certainly mean life is easy for all. Publishers have been working hard to build closer relationships with advertisers, hoping their unique first-party data, especially as the end of the third-party cookie gets nearer. But as a hugely insightful story on Digiday points out, the new world advertisers are being forced to navigate means creating and developing these sort of relationships has suddenly got a hot more difficult.
According to Digiday’s sources, “as advertisers continuing to face pressure from CEOs who want to see ad spending drive results, it has gotten harder than ever for publishers to start relationships with advertisers.”
Managing overall marketing budgets isn’t though going to get any easier over the next year meaning in-housing will never be far from the headlines. One area on the increase, according to a story in Campaign this week, is the in-housing of creative agencies. As the story outlines, a new report from the World Federation of Advertisers finds that 57% of multinationals now have in-house creative teams, with three-quarters of these created in the last five year.
Finally, worth reading for anyone that has struggled with the freedom social media gives to any employee wanting to broadcast their views to the world is a story from The Guardian’s Mark Sweney on the ambitions of new BBC Director General Tim Davie.
The BBC in particular of course has had multiple issues in this regard and Davie doesn’t mince his words when it comes to his planned approach.
“If you want to be an opinionated columnist or a partisan campaigner on social media then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC, saying the new social media rules that will be “rigorously enforced”.
Have a great weekend.
