Dive Brief:
- A variety of studies on digital spending all point the same direction – it is on the rise for a large majority of marketers at all levels.
- Research from Strata of U.S. agency professionals found 76% expect to increase digital spending this year. Separate research from RSW/US found 91% of agency executives plan on spending more on digital channels over last year and 79.6% of senior expect the same.
- Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) on US CEOs found over 25% of that group plans on increasing advertising spending overall this year.
Dive Insight:
The range of marketing industry professionals planning on boosting the digital channel budget this year is not surprising. In fact, last week eMarketer forecasted that digital ad spending would outpace TV for the first time next year, with TV ad spending making up 35.8% of the total U.S. ad spend in 2017 while digital will account for 38.4% of the total spend.
Even though spending on all channels continues to increase – a trend that is in line with the PwC research results on C-suite execs – digital spending is increasing at a higher pace than TV spending. So much so that TV spending is expected to drop below one-third of total media spend by 2020.
One interesting subset within the RSW/US research was that among four media formats – digital, social, mobile and traditional – traditional was the only one where more senior marketers planned on more spending over agency executives. Unlike the other three formats, the percentage expecting a spending increase for both groups was under 50%.