The national recovery will start online. Online advertising spend spiked to an all-time first quarter high in 2011. $7.3 billion dollars in online ad spend. That’s a 23% increase from Q1 of 2010.
This signals a few things. One – the return of digital ad spending. Two – the evolutionary shift of ad dollars from print media to trackable digital adwords advertising. Three – a possible indicator for economic recovery?
Many would argue that last one. Because while these numbers seem huge, there’s still a $70-billion dollar-a-year television market out there waiting to be cannibalized. And until these young Google Adwords professionals are able to convince the Hippos (highest paid person’s opinion) at their company that hyper-targeted online ads are a better use of ad spend, expect the evolution to continue to happen slowly.