In an age where return on investment (ROI) is king, mobile and social are shaping as the next champions.
That's the call in the new Starcom MediaVest Group Media Futures report for 2015, which was handed down at a function in Sydney last night.
The report noted that mobile and social are the two fastest-growing categories in terms of an expected increase in marketers' budgets this year.
The report said the amount marketers would spend in mobile would grow by 22.9% this year, while social would grow by 21.8%.
“Going slow in mobile and social means death, if you don't capitalise on the opportunity quickly it could pass us by,” SMG Australia CEO Chris Nolan said.
Facebook's managing director in Australia and New Zealand, William Easton, said a large part of the appetite for brands to get involved in mobile and social was the sheer amount of time consumers spent on those platforms.
“Brands want to be where consumers are spending most of their time,” Easton said.
Kellogg's Australia marketing director John Broome meanwhile said the share of addressable audience through mobile was increasing all the time.
“At the moment we know we can reach 65% of teens very quickly, but I can also reach 30% of boomers through mobile very effectively.”
An increased focus on ROI followed the Federal Government last year, which crashed consumer confidence and forced marketers to take a good, hard look at where they were spending their money.
Advertisers predicted at the start of 2014 that their above-the-line budgets would increase by 2.6% across the year, but with the Budget, this reversed to a 2% decrease as consumer confidence fell.
“When the market slows, something good happens in that marketers become more efficient in where they are putting their money,” Easton said.
“Obviously in that environment we saw marketers were keen to avoid wastage,” he said.
Kellogg's marketing director for Australia and New Zealand, John Broome, said that it wasn't simply a negative outlook which triggered a fresh look at ROI, but the ongoing fragmentation of the media market.
“I think we're all in a new structural environment where 1% growth is great. There's definitely a lot more flexibility in how we're able to move money around,” Broome said.
It was in this environment of an increased focus on ROI and availability of inventory across different mediums that Kellogg's took the decision to pull its investment in outdoor.
“There just wasn't the ROI measurement there, so we had to take that decision given we have less margin of error to play with,” Broome said.
Broome and Easton were speaking at a panel event in Sydney last night following the release of the report.
SMG Australia chairman John Sintras told AdNews that mediums which could best demonstrate ROI would flourish.
“We're spending less because we know what's working and what's not working across both digital and more traditional media,” Sintras said.
“The ROI has become more sophisticated, the attribution analysis has become more sophisticated. We're understanding what channels are driving and what impact they're having.”
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