UK Marketing Spend Up Again

The Great Recession of 2009 and the subsequent difficult economic conditions we’ve all had to endure these last four years have greatly reshaped both our personal and professional lives as well as companies marketing spend.

Now with economic growth finally emerging and the industry’s starting to be more optimistic about the future, we thought now would be a great time to stand back and reflect over the last few years from a marketing landscape point of view – how has the industry evolved to reflect the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 – 08, the Great Recession of 2009 and the resulting long road to recovery? Let’s compare the landscape in 2006 to last year to see what’s changed and what, surprisingly, hasn’t:

2006

• Advertising spend in 2006 surpassed £19 billion
• Headline expenditure statistics from the Ad Association via WARC:
• Television = 34.1%
• Press = 32.0%
• Direct mail = 17.2%
• Outdoor = 8.0%
• Radio = 4.0%
• Internet (excluding paid search and classified advertising) = 3.4%
• Cinema = 1.4%
• Television expenditure had its first annual decline since 2001 with spend declining by 4.7% on the previous year.
• Internet advertising expenditure overtook national newspaper advertising for the very first time. Online ad spending reached £2.016 billion.
• The UK’s online market share was almost double that of the 5.8% global average
• 14.26 million households had Internet access; Broadband accounted for 9.91 million of these.
• Facebook had 12 million active users and was opened up to the general email addresses in September.
• Twitter publicly hit the internet in July
• Linkedin reached 5 million members

2012

• Advertising expenditure in the UK reached £17,176 billion; the first time spend exceeded £17bn prior to the recession.
• Advertising expenditure breakdown (converting the WARC / Advertising Association Expenditure Report 2012 figures):
• Internet (excluding TV VOD, digital ad spend for newsbrands and magazine brands) = 27.9%
• Television = 26.0%
• Press = 23.4%
• Direct Mail = 12.3%
• Outdoor = 5.6%
• Radio = 3.2%
• Cinema = 1.2%
• Total digital advertising spend for 2012 reached £5.42 billion
• Total national newspaper spending down 6% on 2011 to £1.5bn
• 21 million households had Internet access installed.
• 93% (19,530,000) of those households with Internet access had a Broadband connection.
• The UK overtook Japan in terms of mobile Internet usage, with the 60% of mobile phone users claiming to have a smartphone.
• Mobile ad spend exceeded the half a billion mark, and accounted for 10% of digital spend.
• Mobile ad spend rose from 1.1% in 2009.
• The last three years saw ad spend on social media rise almost four-fold by 383% to £328.4 million in 2012
• Facebook reached 1.01 billion active users
• Twitter exceeded 200 million active users
• Linkedin reached 187 million members
• Other 2012 social networks: Pinterest had around 10.4 million users; Instagram had 30 million accounts; Tumblr had around 50 million blogs and Snapchat saw 20 million photos being delivered daily.

Amongst all of the facts and figures one thing is crystal clear – the marketing landscape has changed dramatically. The explosion of new channels together with increased access to the Internet (particularly via mobile devices) has moved the marketing world into the fast lane. It is going to stay there. Are you keeping pace with it?

We’d really like to know if you agree so please complete our very quick survey, which will enable us to draw comparisons with the national picture.

Sources

2006:

WARC: UK Adspend Surpassed £19 billion in 2006, Reports Ad Association

IAB/PWC UK online adspend figures 2006

Office for National Statistics – Statistical Bulletin (Internet Access Households and Individuals 2009

Yahoo – Number of active users at Facebook over the years

Wikipedia

Linkedin – Our Story

2012:

Ad Association / WARC Expenditure Report 2012

Financial Times: UK advertising spending reaches for pre-crisis levels

Office for National Statistics – Internet Access – Household and Individuals, 2012

The Guardian: UK leads world in mobile web use thanks Facebook… and Gangnam

IAB UK: 2012 Full Year Digital Adspend Results

M&M Global: Mobile captures 10% of 2012 UK digital ad spend

Digital Marketing Show: UK digital ad spend up 12.5% to £5.5 billion in 2012

Yahoo – Number of active users at Facebook over the years

Wikipedia

Linkedin – Our Story

Techcrunch

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