Oxyfish

The doom-and-gloom set have been getting a lot of press lately, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that display advertising will die off in favor of performance-based marketing. But don’t write the obituary yet. There’s an interesting new study from MarketingSherpa and ad:tech that surveys 1200 marketers and concludes that most actually plan to increase display ad spending in 2009. From the report summary:

The greatest shift in budgets is for behaviorally targeted ads. About one out of five marketers (21%) are cutting their budget while more than half (52%) are investing more money. Slightly more than 30% of the respondents said that behaviorally targeted ads were providing a great ROI, as noted in the first chart.

Surprisingly, 46% of marketers reported that they are increasing spending on rich media ads, despite the fact that more marketers reported that they deliver a poor ROI (27%) than a great ROI (23%), as noted in the second chart.

Traditional online ads will get more spending from 29% of marketers. That tops the 24% who said they’re cutting budgets in this area. This is surprising as well since about 1 out of 3 respondents (34%) said banner ads deliver a poor ROI and only 13% said they were great.

Perhaps the branding effect of the ads, while not directly attributable to revenue, is seen as vital. Almost half of marketers (47%) are holding steady in this category.

Surprisingly, this seems to suggest that marketers are not exactly running away from traditional online ads, but instead could actually be increasing their spend, particularly for rich media. And behaviorally targeted ads are typically display ads too, just targeted at audiences instead of content. So while performance-based advertising is very important to every marketer’s mix, let’s not lose sight of the fact display advertising, in various forms, is critical too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Advertising, Yieldex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.