Digital advertising spend hits record levels as smartphone usage rockets
Consumers spending more time on their smartphones has led to a boom in companies spending big on digital advertising.
The amount spent on digital advertising last year hit a high of £11.5bn in 2017, a 14 per cent rise on 2016 figures.
The findings released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC found that 2017 was the first year that adults spent more time online on smartphones than on computers and tablets combined.
More than half (59 per cent) of the total time spent online was done on a smartphone.
Advertisers were also found to be responding to this, as they spent £476m more on smartphones ads than they did in 2016.
Social media ad spend grew by 38 per cent, with 83 per cent of this spend now going towards smartphone advertising.
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“It’s amazing this year that the amount spent on mobile video grew by almost half a billion pounds,” Jon Mew, chief executive of IAB told City A.M. “This reflects what consumers are spending more time doing.”
Mew added that an emerging format for advertisers was podcasts.
“The main reason people download podcasts is educational, and the other reason people named was learning a new skill,” he said.
“Growth in these areas has seen brands invest in creating new content. Companies are responding to people using sites like YouTube by creating videos teaching consumers to do certain things, for example.”
The IAB’s report follows statistics out yesterday that found that many companies were still upping the amount of money spent on traditional advertising, despite the shift towards digital.
But Mew shrugged off any speculation that advertisers would move budgets from formats like print over to digital.
“Every media still plays an important role,” he argued. “What we’re seeing is print titles making more and more money from digital.
“As with every media, everyone is becoming more digital and all the print publishers are seeing success from growing their circulation.”
Responding to news that Money Saving Expert founder Martin Lewis was suing Facebook for defamation, Mew admitted that there was more for the whole industry to do to clean up the digital space.
“We’ve all got a responsibility to resolve any problems,” he commented. “ASA exists to make sure ads are honest and truthful, and there will always be things that slip through, but as an industry we need to do a better job to pick things up.”