The majority of brands plan to increase their budgets for online advertising this year, according to the 2013 Online Advertising Performance Outlook report by Nielsen. The study, just published, polled 615 participants, 287 of whom were senior brand leaders, 176 agency executives and 152 publishing experts.
63% of marketers participating in the study said they will increase their online brand advertising spend in 2013, and 20% said they plan to boost budgets by 20% or more. The biggest element of the increase will come from growing budgets for social media advertising (70%), mobile advertising (69%) and video advertising (64%), as marketers continuously shift their focus to these channels. In contrast, only 13% of brands claimed they would increase their marketing budget for television advertising, and just 19% of brands are looking to increase their budget for display advertising.
64% of marketing professionals plan to combine digital brand and direct response advertising this year, while 18% intend to focus only on digital brand advertising and another 18% plan to solely use direct response advertising. However, brand advertising spend is expected to grow faster than spending on direct response advertising, as 61% of the polled marketers said they are shifting budgets to brand advertising campaigns, the report found.
The trend is even more noticeable amongst media sellers, 60% of whom predict that the majority of their online advertising revenue will be generated from brand advertising in the coming year. The brand advertising landscape is changing as marketers are following their target audience across various platforms and into new media. Since online brand advertising is becoming more important, the report recommends that brand marketers, agencies and publishers collaborate and address the new challenges in order to fully realise the potential of all available channels.