Commitment To Online Marketing Increases

The survey, in its second year and coming ahead of the show on June 7-8, had 40% of respondents say that they spend 26% or more of their marketing budget online compared to 27% of respondents in 2005, with 14% now spending more than three quarters of their marketing budget online.

The percentage of those spending less than 10% of their marketing budget online has dropped by half since 2005, with 27% of respondents spending less than 10% of their marketing budget online compared with 56% of respondents last year.

Meanwhile, 24% of those surveyed considered email to be the key growth area in online marketing, although mobile marketing (17%) and search engine optimisation (19%) were also said to be key areas.

Additionally, 23% of respondents said that search (see Marketers Fail To Harness Search Marketing Potential) is a key growth area for 2006, which no doubt reflects the fact that it now represents over half of all advertising pounds spent online.

iTV was only highlighted as a key growth area by 6% of respondents, a drop of 1% from last year, which the OMS suggests is because of Sky’s position in the field and the lack of any challengers to their dominance.

Web 2.0, blogs, RSS and podcasting were other areas consistently highlighted in the survey and when respondents were asked what they would ask of an online marketing expert, many questions concerned Web 2.0, with one example being: “What is blogging and how can it benefit my company?”.

The survey also showed that over a quarter of companies do not spend more than 10% of their budget online and that figure has dropped from 56% of companies in 2005, while in last year’s survey only 9% of companies spent more than half their budget online, a figure which has increased to 23% in this year’s survey.

Internet adspend is predicted to outperform other media in Europe this year (see Internet Adspend Likely To Grow For 2006) with minimal growth expected to be the norm.