Online Advertising Ready To Takeoff In 2012

Earlier this week, I wrote about the multiple reports coming out that identify massive growth in mobile marketing ad spend and impressions.

The largest estimates came late Tuesday from InMobi who estimated smart phone advertising revenues have increased by almost 500% and tablet advertising was up nearly 800% from a year ago.

Then this week, BtoB Magazine released their “2012 Outlook survey” showing how online advertising is poised to see significant growth in 2012 as well.

With all this recent news, I believe it offers hope that marketers are beginning to catch up to consumer media habits that are shifting away fr0m traditional marketing channels like print to more engaging forms of content on social, mobile and digital channels.

BtoB magazine’s “2012 Outlook” survey reported that 41% of B2B Marketers will increase spending in 2012 while 48% will see their marketing budgets remain flat.

Despite the almost-half that are keeping budgets flat, online ad spending will see a significant increase over last year. 74% of marketers reported that they will increase online ad spend, the largest increase compared to events, print and direct mail.

The areas included in the survey’s definition of “online” includes websites, email, social media, search, video content and webcasts/virtual events. Additionally, the survey revealed that 70% of B2B Marketers are using social media and 24% mobile marketing in their 2012 marketing plans.

In a bow to this growing trend, The “Digital Marketing edition” of BtoB Magazine was released on a platform created by digital magazine publisher NxtBook. This may be a further sign of things to come for traditional print media as some publishers consider the costs of print and declining ad sales and subscriptions for all-print media.

A separate article in the magazine provided some guidance on actual growth estimates.

• Global ad spending will grow 5% while Online will grow 11.2% according to media investment firm MagnaGlobal
• ZenithOptimedia reported global ad revenue to grow 4.7% while online advertising is projected to grow 12.7% with decreases in TV, newspaper and magazines.
• Both project online ad revenue to approach a 20% share of all ad spending.
• And in an editorial, the magazine also listed social media, mobile marketing and content marketing as the top 3  B2B Marketing trends in 2012.

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