Advertising budgets are predicted to rise by a modest 1.8% this year with the biggest increases planned for social (up 11.5%), mobile (up 10.9%), online video and paid search (both up 6.1%), the 2017 Starcom Media Futures Report has found.
Free-to-air TV budgets are predicted to rise by 1.3%, a noticeable turnaround on the 2.6% decrease last year, while subscription TV budgets are forecast to drop 1.6%. Ad budgets for cinema (down 3.6%), newspapers (down 5.5%) and magazines (down 6.6%) continue to contract.
Paid advertising budgets are one percentage point lower than the 2.8% rise last year, while owned media budgets are predicted to increase by 9.8%.
The annual Starcom Media Futures report surveys the top 500 advertisers in Australia as well as major media sales executives and 300 consumers. It is regarded as one of the most reputable forecasts of media spending in Australia.
The CX expectations gap
This year's report focused on customer experience and the huge disconnect between how well companies think they are doing on CX versus consumer sentiment.
It found that 2.5 times more businesses now have a specialist CX department than a year ago.
When asked whether an organisation was meeting consumer expectations, marketers rated themselves 61% higher than consumers.
By category, the greatest expectation gaps between how well a company thinks it is doing compared to consumers are in alcoholic beverages (63%), airlines (61%), banking (52%) and beauty (48%). Those categories where the gap is less include supermarkets (24%), fast moving consumer goods (16%) and consumer electronics (6%).
At the event, Starcom Australia CEO Toby Barbour believes business is at risk of prioritising data over people.
“Business and media as an industry need a big pivot,” he said. “We almost need to ask the question – should channel planning die?
“The expectation gap is real, it's happening now and it puts revenue under threat for all of our businesses.
“[We need to] rethink data because customers, people, humans – they're more than just what the data tells us....the complexity gap in data is in fact feeding the consumer expectation gap.”
Less storytelling, more story doing
Matt Jones, founder and creative strategist at Better Happy, believes business has become too focused on governing by numbers and using the creative guys to tell a compelling story around it.
He says there is too much “Wall Street meets Madison Avenue thinking” in business and not enough Disney and Silicon Valley thinking.
“There's too much faith in storytelling and not enough story doing,” he points out.
“We talk too much about customer experience and not enough about the wider consumer experience and brand perception that shapes what I feel before I even go into that customer experience.
“We don't want to lose our jobs by making a daft, weird irrational, non-measurable decision, but our customers are human. They aren't rational at all and brand is absolutely at the irrational end of things – people are biased and that bias is not rational.”
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