According to Advertising Age measured ad spending for the top 100 biggest advertisers dropped 0.2% for the first half of 2012 compared to 2011. While there was a small increase in spending for TV it did not make up for the losses experienced by newspapers and magazines. Total ad spending for the period went up by 4.8% but that extra money went into various digital plays (search marketing, online video and some forms of social media), promotion and direct marketing which are not measured by Advertising Age.
Nielsen’s quarterly Global AdView Pulse report showed the decline in ad spend for magazines in North American was 5% and for newspapers the decline was 2.1%. Clearly, the need for still photography in print advertising is declining.
According to infographic 17% of total marketing budgets were directed toward digital marketing in 2011. That percentage was expected to increase in 2012 and to steadily increase thereafter. Worse yet for the photography industry, 70% of digital marketing budgets in 2011 went to SEO and social media, uses that do not need photography. Marketers said they expected to spend more for this type of marketing in 2012.
Photographers looking for more work may want to put some effort into tracking what local businesses are doing on the Internet. Infographic also reported that 20% of all Google searches each month are for local businesses. Which businesses in your area have web sites? Do the sites have pictures? Would professionally produced images, specific to the particular business, help the owners sell more products? Who designs the sites? Getting answers to these questions will certainly require some digging, but in the long run it may be more productive than spending time producing images on speculation to dump into already overloaded stock photo files.
Of people who use the Internet 57% use search on a daily basis. Out of those daily searches, 46% of them are for information on products or services.
Mobile
Mobile ads are also a big growth area. eMarketer
estimates that the U.S. mobile ad industry will grow 96.6% in 2012 to $2.3 billion, marking it the first year that the U.S. market is bigger than Japan’s. Though Japan’s market is considered more mature, it will still grow 27.2% to $1.7 billion. Western Europe is experiencing faster growth — 68.3% — but is smaller than both at $1.3 billion.
Worldwide, mobile ad spending for 2012 is expected to be $6.4 billion and by 2016 that is expected to grow to $23.6 billion. Lots of that money will be spent advertising locally delivered products and services. To put this in perspective total advertising spending worldwide is estimated by Nielsen at $498 billion and the magazine and newspaper segment of this total at about $147 billion.
Nevertheless, this is the future. Mobile is growing more quickly than pretty much every other segment in digital advertising.