#digialmedia

I love to read information in relation to digital media. I have written a bunch of stuff of information I have found that shows digital media, video in particular is skyrocketing in the marketing and advertising world. Here is more proof on the subject. Keep in mind that your business does not have to be a huge Fortune 500 company to embrace these stats. Any size business can use digital media to market their brand.

US digital advertising spend for the first half of 2019 totaled $57.9bn, an all-time high for the first six months of a year, according to a report from the IAB and PwC US.

The record total marks a 17% uptick from the previous half-year mark. Video advertising saw the fastest level of year-over-year growth at 36%, totaling $9.5bn.

The report pretty much states what social media has been accomplishing and that is the rise of non-traditional forms of video, namely connected TV and social video stories, has given advertisers new ways to reach younger audiences cutting the cord.

Digital video growth has played a key role in giving 2019 the strongest opening. Businesses are turning to social video stories and connected TV to reach a growing audience of ‘cord-Nevers’ – a younger cohort who’ve never subscribed to cable television and cannot be reached via linear TV ads. Indicators show CTV and addressable TV are on the rise.”

Mobile advertising accounts for the chunk of digital ad spend at $40bn, a 29% increase compared to the previous year.

Audio is on the rise, too. With the growth and advancement of smart speakers and the growing abundance of podcasts, audio spend totaled $1.2bn, a 30% increase compared to the previous year.

How Digital Media Has Changed the Advertising Game

Sometimes I wish that I was working in the ad industry back in the 80s and 90s. Love for the aesthetics of that era aside, I miss when copy was king. I miss hokey, text-heavy ads like this one for the Gameboy.

But I have to face the reality of the digital age – no one wants to read long copy anymore. We want images, videos, and the sound of our favorite podcaster trying to find a new way to talk about Blue Apron after they’ve talked about it one hundred times before. We scroll through our phones so quickly that we don’t have the time to stop and read a block of text, no matter how clever or well-written it is.

I use the word “want” very loosely. We don’t necessarily “want” to see online ads, we’re just more likely to stop and look at a video than we are a paragraph. But unfortunately for advertisers, one of the biggest problems with digital media is that it’s becoming increasingly easier to make these ads disappear altogether.

It almost feels like a crime to use an adblocker while I’m studying advertising, but I think I’d go insane without it. When my old adblocker suddenly stopped working on Youtube videos, the 10-minute video I was trying to watch was interrupted by unskippable ads three times – how anyone could put up with that is beyond me.

But we can’t – and we shouldn’t – stop people from using adblockers, even if it does cost the industry tens of billions of dollars per year. The solution instead, I think, is to make more ads that don’t look like ads. Facebook is loaded with this type of branded content, from cooking videos that just so happen to use a heaping spoonful of Cool Whip or a cute puppy that just so happens to be eating Pedigree kibble.