Digital advertising on the rise in British

London: The branding and advertising of the products and services had been witnessing ever-increasing growth on the social media sites in Britian as it showed  that almost 5 billion pounds ($8 billion) spent on online advertising  in 2011, The Economist Times reported.

 Britain has led the way in moving advertising money to the internet from traditional media such as newspapers and radio and the latest report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) put growth for 2011 up 14.4 percent, with a similar rate expected this year.

Much of that growth was due to the high level of internet access and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets which allow users to access the internet on the go.

The study, conducted by PwC, said advertising on the internet increased by 14.4 percent in 2011 to 4.8 billion pounds. Previous surveys looking at the whole ad market have shown advertising money moving from newspapers to online while television remained stable.

The IAB said 39.7 million people were on average accessing the internet each month in Britain, while 27 percent of all the time spent online was spent on social networks such as Facebook.

Among the fastest areas of online growth, spending on online video ads doubled in the year to 109 million pounds and has now grown eight-fold since 2008. Spending on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn was up 75 percent to 240 million pounds.

And spending on mobile devices, which is included in the online category, was up 157 percent to 203 million pounds due to the increasing number of people who own smartphones.

Search advertising, which is dominated by Google and allows consumers to directly respond to a brand and purchase their goods, maintained its impressive performance, up 17.5 percent to 2.8 billion pounds, giving it a 58 percent share of online advertising spend, up slightly in 2010.

Of the different sectors, finance brands were the biggest advertisers in display advertising, ahead of consumer goods and retail.

Digital Advertisement in Pakistan

Pakistan is far behind in adopting new global trends in the country as merely few companies have moved to digital media for online branding campagins over a period of five years.

Majority of the companies do prefer advertise on social networking and video sharing sites particulalry Facebook and  Youtube, however, some of the companies have realized potential of local online news websites and reaping its benefits of local market.

Presently, there not more than 50 companies onboard with digital agencies for advertisement of their products and services on social media. These companies earmark 8 to 10 percent of total advertisement budget for social media including Google, Facebook, News’ Websites and different blogs, according to an estimate.

Roughly guesstimates showed that different companies spend budget of Rs 440 million in 2010 in advertisement and Rs 540 million in 2011, showing a growth of 22.7 percent growth year-on-year.

As the awareness about digital media is on the rise among the marketers, the business volume is likely to be seen a quantum jump in the current year with entry of big tycoons of different sectors in the digital advertisements with their products and services.

There are more than 20 million and growing internet users in different cities of Pakistan, which ensures that the digital media is the effective medium of vast and persuasive advertisement campaigns.

Posted in: Online Advertising