Marketing Pilgrim

Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s working wonders for the online ad business. According to eMarketer, video is showing the highest spending growth numbers of any category.

Last year video went up 42.1% and it’s expected to keep in the double-digits for the next few years.

More spending, means claiming a larger share of the online ad pie. For video, it’s currently at 7.9%, just barely sneaking past Classifieds and Directories. The share is expected to rise to 15% by 2016, keeping it solidly in third place.

Add in search and banners and these three ads account for 80% of all ads sold. Search, accounting for almost half of all online ads by themselves.

It’s ironic that the top story on Yahoo’s front page is about how J. C. Penney is reinventing the brand. Perhaps the higher ups at Yahoo should read their own article, then maybe sit down with the retailer for a round of commiseration and cheering up.

The once powerful Yahoo, just reported a decline in net income of 5% for Q4. Recently, Yahoo invested a lot of money and effort into raising the quality of its content. That gave them the title of the “most trafficked news site on the web,” but apparently that didn’t help their bottom line.

A large part of the problem is the drop in their display advertising business. This used to be the jewel in the crown for Yahoo, but now they’re down 4% quarter over quarter.

What do jackalopes, killer veggie burritos and taxidermy, have in common? They’re all featured in a new public service campaign from the Digital Advertising Alliance.

The “Your AdChoices” campaign is a new initiative from the DAA, designed to teach consumers about online ads and privacy. They created a website and three videos: “Meet the AdChoices Icon,” “What is Interest Based Advertising,” and “Your Ad Choices and You.”

Wisely, they decided to go with humor in order to make their point. Sadly, they went a little too far.

Each of the three videos is loaded with in-your-face graphics and text that literally screams at you. And then there’s the voiceover which sounds like a combination old-school TV pitchman and a drag-race announcer. (Sunday! Sunday! Sunday at the Atco Dragway!) The videos are funny, for the first 20 seconds, then they’re just annoying.

Magazines used to be one of my biggest joys, writing for them, reading them, browsing for new mags on the rack at the bookstore. The first time I saw the block-long newsstand in Los Angeles, I nearly fainted at the printed joy.

Those days are gone and that’s one of the reasons why online ad spending is predicted to top print ad spending in the coming year. Mind you, I’m not saying I’m personally responsible for the decline in magazine sales, but certainly I played my part!

eMarketer predicts that online ad spending will top $39.5 billion this year, a 23.3% increase over last year. But it’s not just the decline of the offline reader that is giving online ad sales a boost. In general, advertisers have become more comfortable with the concept of online spending. It was bound to happen once the internet wormed its way into our everyday lives.

Advertisers spent 29% more on video ads than they planned over the past year and two-thirds of advertisers said they’ll spend even more in 2012.

The numbers come from Break Media’s “Digital Video Advertising Trends: 2012″ report and overall, it shows that video advertising is on the rise. Mobile shows the most growth going from use in 39% of video ads in 2011 to an anticipated 55% in 2012.

In order to pay for the increase in video spending, 45% of advertisers are taking the money out of the online display budget while 38% expect an increase in their overall ad budget to cover the difference.

So all this confidence must come with a big reward, right? Could be, say the video advertisers, if only we had a way of measuring our success!

Earlier this year, Kantar Media said they were cautiously optimistic about the future of the ad dollar. Now, they say that optimism has been replaced “by the statistical evidence of progressively slowing growth rates.”

Jon Swallen, SVP Research at Kantar Media North America lays it out for you,

“From +4.1 percent in the first quarter, to +2.8 percent in the second quarter and now a barely palpable +0.4 percent for the July to September period. During Q3, an expanding number of the largest marketers became even more conservative with their ad budgets and these reductions have neutralized the healthy spending growth occurring among mid-sized advertisers.”

Aw, that’s not good, is it?

Looking strictly at internet ad spending, it was a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz spoke up for self-regulation of targeted advertising during a presentation at ad:tech New York on Tuesday.

He stated that consumers must be given a choice as to how much of their personal data is tracked, but it’s up to the ad industry, not the government, to make it so.

“We at the FTC have no interest in shutting down the Internet party,” he said. “Our only concern is that, if guests understand there could be a cover charge to the party [in the form of giving up some privacy], they should be able to make meaningful choices about how much they’ll pay.”

This comes just as the Digital Advertising Alliance released an up-dated set of principles regarding online data collection.