Press the panic button, traditional advertising is dying!

By Daniel Chukwu 

A king once fought so hard to kill a usurper who would take his throne. He knew his time was up, but he scratched and clawed, and eventually, he remained king. But the usurper continued to grow popular among the people. He was young, he was vibrant, energetic, had more charisma and full to bursting with ideas. The king knew he wouldn’t last for much longer. So when he was mortally wounded during a battle, he just couldn’t face the shame of dying in the hands of his enemies. He asked his armour bearer to kill him. “I am dying, anyway,” he said. “Better to die in the hands of a friend than in the hand of my enemy.” His armour bearer was afraid to do it, so he took out his own sword and fell on it. There he was, as dead as a dodo! 

Traditional advertising has remained king for the better part of the last century. And like the Biblical anecdote above, no one thought it would ever fizzle out or get a competitor, much less completely overthrown. So when online advertising started becoming popular and marketers started talking about traditional advertising dying in the early 1990s, little did we know that the rivalry will become intense in just less than two decades; with speculations even suggesting that digital advertising spend will surpass traditional in 2019. But before we dive right into how traditional advertising is dying, let us differentiate between the two. 

Is traditional advertising different from digital? 

In truth, there is now a blurry line between what you’d call traditional advertising and digital advertising. This is largely so because insertion of advertisements in some mainstream media like television and radio are often seen as traditional. The same way digital experts see advertising through radio and TV as digital. But let us for the purpose of this article, define traditional advertising as all advertising that is done in offline media, while digital is done in online media. 

These definitions are simple and give us a more easy-to-grasp idea of how the widely perceived digital advertising and traditional advertising work. And it places our discuss in the right perspective.

In what sense has traditional advertising been dying? 

Marketers have been prophesying about how traditional advertising will die and give way to the rise of a more robust, modern form of advertising as we have in digital today. We don’t mean dying as in the slow and painful death that ends in total inactivity. We mean dying as in losing all relevance and usefulness. So when compared with digital or online advertising, is traditional advertising really losing its relevance? 

What the stats are saying 

With the rise and rise of online advertising, the numbers have definitely favoured digital advertising. In 2018 alone, for instance, Statista estimated that a total of 283 billion U.S dollars was spent on digital advertising worldwide, with the figures projected to rise by 17.6% to 333.25 billion in 2019, and 517 billion by 2023. This is expected to total up to 50% total advertising spend by 2019, and according to Emarketer, the digital research firm, this will make up two-thirds of all ad spend in less than 4 years. 

With separate reports already suggesting that digital advertising spend make up 51% of total Ad spend in the United States in 2018, it looks like the day of reckoning is here sooner than expected. 

Traditional advertising (That is radio, Television and print) by contrast spent an estimated total of 114.84 U.S billion dollars in the United States in 2018. Even though Marketing Interactive had predicted a 1.0% decline in traditional Ad spend in 2018, the figures actually rose by 1.1% to $296.17 million in 2018. This brings the total global ad spend in traditional advertising to 114.296 Billion.

The trends will shock you

A new trend that has gained worldwide attention is over-the-top (OTT) advertising. That is advertising targeting streaming devices like smart TVs and similar devices used for streaming digital contents from the internet. According to Mobile Leads, video consumption on over-the-top gadgets grew by 51.7% in 2018. What this means is that contents originally consumed on cable TV are now being streamed and consumed like normal TV contents. With the figures expected to continue rising, TV commercials will decline and most likely die.

But despite the fact that the way people consume media products has changed, advertisers are still putting a lot of paychecks in the hands of traditional media owners. More paychecks went to traditional media than digital in 2018. Although, digital ad spend in 2018 was more, compared to 2017, both digital and traditional media keep enjoying an increase in ad spend. 

Should we be worried?  

Not at all. In fact, as more advertising funds keep going to digital, Ad spend on traditional media keeps increasing. The projected 1.0% decrease last year which eventually amounted to a 1.1% increase, for example, shows that traditional media will be very much around for a long time to come. Both media will continue to see an increase in ad spend for some time to come. But while the traditional advertising will see a sort of arithmetic progression in terms of increase, spending in digital media will see more of a geometric progression. That is, the former will increase in the form of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, while the latter will go 1, 3, 9, 21, 63, 189. 

The truth is, even though digital advertising has shown to account for ad spend way better than traditional, there will still be a lot of laggards in upper management at most of these big companies around, who still want to see their ads in Newspapers, TV, and radio. They will continue to pump money into traditional media and it will take a while before we see a complete, overwhelming shift to digital advertising. 

So what now?

There is already overwhelming shreds of evidence, and they all seem to point towards the eventual demise or death of traditional advertising. But there are also indications that traditional advertising is doing well at the moment. With over-the-top media consumption gaining ground, TV advertising and other forms of traditional advertising like Print and Radio also going digital, it doesn’t look like traditional advertising is going to die. Unlike our little anecdote in the first paragraph, the king is beginning to wear a new face, and that may as well pass for reinvention. 

NB: Extrapolations were made because some figures proved elusive.

#Advertising #AdvertisingSpend #AdSpend #Branding