Research Charts Spending Boom In Dotcom Advertising
New research has shown just how much adspend by dotcom and ecommerce advertisers has increased over the last five years. Figures from CIA MediaLab show that spending in this category has increased from £2.6m to £257.1m since 1995. This period has also seen a diversification in the media used by these advertisers, with a decline in the use of press advertising, which made up 94.9% of adspend in 95/96 but now makes up around 40%, and a large increase in the use of television advertising, which has come from nothing to command 42% of dotcom adspend last year.
CIA’s research shows that outdoor advertising, which attracts 8.3% of adspend from this sector, is especially popular with online stores. Online stores make up 48% of the sector, and particularly favour outdoor sites in London. After outdoor, online shopping sites also favoured Carlton, which benefited from £7.3m worth of adspend from these companies.
ISPs, which make up 41% of the sector, favour advertising on the ITV network and also in newspapers, especially the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, last year to the tune of £14m. ISPs favoured LWT with the largest share of budget, spending £6.4m. Carlton was the second favourite, attracting £5.7m.
The top outlets for e-commerce advertisers (11% of the sector) was the Financial Times, which attracted £6.6m worth of advertising from September 1999 to August 2000, followed by the Daily Telegraph which trailed with £1.9m.
Four of the top 15 dotcom and e-commerce advertisers last year, including Lets Buy It.com, which spent over £5.2m, didn’t exist during the previous year, which demonstrates the infancy of the sector. A further five on this list spent so little in the previous year as to be deemed non-applicable in a year on year analysis.
The biggest spender was BT, which has been heavily marketing its unlimited access package during the past year, spending more than £33m, a 459% change compared to the 1999 total of £5.9m. AOL, which targets a similar family audience to BT, came second with its spend of £18.3m, up 146% from 1999’s £7.5m.
The only one of the top 15 to decrease its adspend year on year was IBM, which remains at number 6, thanks to its spend of £6.5m, but has actually brought this amount down by 2% since last year, when it spent £6.7m. However, IBM, along with BT, dominated the table of top spending e-commerce brands. Over £11m was spent between the two companies promoting their e-business packages.
CIA Medialab: 020 7803 2000
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