In this edition Jonathan Devereux, Programmatic Manager at Mi9 gives us his views on what’s on the horizon for the leading sectors as the economy starts to reclaim its growth.
I see ad spend continue to increase driven largely (and unsurprisingly) by the Retail, Food, and Telecoms sectors, as the economy slowly claws its way back online from the aftermath of Level 4 lockdown. This further illustrated in Graphs 1 to 3 below.
Retail ad spending is closing in on pre-lockdown levels, which I believe can be attributed to the efficacy of digital advertising and its ability to drive online retail conversions. This is especially true when competing industries are still effectively offline; freeing up your unique audience to be targeted at a cheaper price than they would otherwise cost.
Currently Mi9 is working on building out a conversion tracking and audience segmentation product which will allow us to package up audiences seen from Homepage Takeover and direct buys into always-on private marketplace (PMP) deals. This will help to drive further value in the e-commerce space. Our end goal here is to help buyers identify users that have historically driven ROI through digital conversion after seeing a Homepage Takeover, and package those users up into always-on PMP deals. This will invariably allow agencies to continue buying as part of always-on strategies.
In comparison to the Retail sector, the reverse trend can be seen for Financial, Travel, Airlines and Automotive industries where a notable drop off in spend is apparent. The latter does make sense to me, with Travel and Airlines unsurprisingly at effectively 0 and Automotive with test drives and showrooms still offline. What does surprise me however, is that Finance remains low considering that people still have Mortgages to pay and, in the incredibly competitive and volatile rate market right now, there seems to be a vacuum in marketing and awareness which is ripe for a bank to dominate in.
