As Facebook celebrates its 10th birthday today, Jason Woodford, Chief Executive of digital marketing agency SiteVisibility, has looked at how digital ad spend has changed dramatically since 2004. Digital advertising spend in the UK surpassed £6bn in 2013 with ad budgets up 17.5 per cent over the first six months to more than £3bn. In comparison, in January 2005 the Internet represented just a mere 3% of all marketing spend in the UK during Q4 of 2004.
Facebook’s tenth birthday is the ideal time to look back and analyse how marketing spend has changed over the past decade. Granted, you can’t deny that Facebook has been on a wonderful journey going from zero to one billion users around the world. Social media has become the preoccupation of advertisers, media agencies and all forms of creative agencies.
There can be little doubt that social media platforms will continue to launch and thrive but the challenge for us all is where will it all go to over time? How different will marketing spend look in years to come? Digital advertising spend in the UK surpassed £6bn in 2013 with ad budgets up 17.5 per cent over the first six months to more than £3bn; this is a record high.
Looking back and the quarterly Bellwether Report in January 2005 found that the Internet represented just a mere 3% of all marketing spend in the UK during Q4 of 2004. During that time, just one in ten companies questioned allocated more than 10% of their total marketing budgets online with direct marketing and sale promotion the most popular tactic.
Fast forward ten years and you can see how the evolution of the Internet and the introduction of Facebook has forever changed the landscape of business budgets globally. I can only predict that marketing spend is going to change dramatically once again over the course of the next few years as many start to realise the potential of mobile.
There is a need to engage audiences on all screens and devices and as the UK’s biggest brands are expected to spend more on marketing to boost sales in 2014 as optimism among companies improves, I can imagine this will be top of the agenda.
By Jason Woodford
Chief Executive
SiteVisibility