New SMG Media Futures 2015 survey reveals advertiser confidence twice as strong as media

Advertisers are twice as optimistic about the year ahead compared to their media exec counterparts, forecasting a 2.7% spend growth, compared to 1.3%, according to this year’s Media Futures survey from Starcom MediaVest Group.

Says Chris Nolan (left), CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group: “For the last three years, we’ve seen modest ad spend predictions from both advertisers and media execs, which has aligned with actual industry spend figures.  Rather than this being cyclical, it now appears to be a structural change as the impact of dollars shifting from paid to owned media starts to hit.”

Social and mobile will see significant growth this year, while Facebook’s introduction of video ad formats last year has sparked huge growth in visual social spend.

Says Nolan: “Last year we said there was a paradigm shift for marketers around personalisation and the strong growth in mobile, social and video reinforces that.”

This year for the first time the survey asked advertisers about their use of dynamic creative online ad solutions which allows advertisers to change ad messaging based on consumer behaviour. In 2015, over half of advertisers expect to utilise dynamic creative solutions, up from 39% who used it last year. 

Says Nolan: “The overwhelming feedback from advertisers who utilised dynamic creative last year was that it was incredibly successful and so we expect to see a stronger marriage of data and creative in place this year.”

For the third year in a row, the study recorded a decline in the proportion of advertisers using point-of-sale for their below-the-line efforts, while use of SMS campaigns is expected to increase.

Continues Nolan: “Increased consumer acceptance to allow location tracking and push notifications to mobiles enables advertisers to influence decisions near the point of purchase. This is an important shift in a space that has traditionally been owned by retailers and in-store promotions.”

Key themes and trends

• Search, display and performance are maturing in their growth phase
• The increase in spending on owned and earned media is expected to be almost 3.5 times that of the increase in total paid media
• Australian social and mobile trends mirror global but with one of the world’s highest smart phone penetration rates, Australian marketers are poised to drive innovation in this space.
• 70% of advertisers, agencies and publishers (up 56% from last year) say they will use data partners and data management platforms (DMPs) to optimise online campaigns.
• The focus on ROI is also a hot topic for marketers, with sales modelling and social media monitoring the preferred approach for ROI analysis. Delivering results and effectiveness sits alongside meeting company objectives as the key pressures for marketers.

Overall, marketers face increased pressure to deliver more agile marketing approaches as new learning systems allow them to understand more about their customers in real-time.

“The technology to allow contextually relevant, tailored marketing to the individual is here and marketers are faced with the task of making it happen.

Concludes Nolan: “The challenge for marketers is working out how much they are able to do in-house versus engaging agency partners to manage for them. We are starting to see brands establishing in-house data and technology capabilities, such as DMPs and more recently programmatic buying capabilities, which will change the role agencies play for marketers.”