A new survey of strategic media planners conducted by the Digital Place-based Advertising Association [1] shows a dramatic increase in the percentage of digital place-based media spending that is coming out of digital and online budgets.
Just over 40% of planners who responded to the survey said that they will fund their digital place-based media plans through digital and online budgets, an increase of 75% over the 22.9% who said in the DPAA’s 2011 survey that they would tap digital and online budgets to fund DPb.
Outdoor budgets remained the most popular source for DPb funding, with just over 64% citing this category versus 54% in 2011.
Planners were asked: “When considering digital place-based networks for inclusion in your media plan(s), from which existing media would you fund the ad dollars?” The top five most frequently cited in the 2012 survey were:
- Outdoor: 64.2% (2011: 54.2%)
- Television: 40.7% (2011: 43.8%)
- Digital/Online: 40.1% (2011: 22.9%)
- Experimental/Test: 19.8% (2011: 18.8%)
- Zero-Based Planning 15.4% (2011: 19.8%)
When asked to project spending for 2013, 94.2% of survey respondents said they would include DPb media in their plans, compared to 86.3 % in the 2011 research, a gain of 9%.
Awareness of research tools and services that include data on digital place-based media is increasing among strategic media planners. Among the research services including DPb at the time the survey was fielded, overall awareness grew significantly year-to-year.
Planners’ knowledge of DPb Research availability definitely increased regarding all but that of Arbitron:
- Nielsen [2]: 54.0% (2011: 46.4%)
- GfK MRI [3]: 41.9% (2011: 38.5%)
- IMS [3]: 32.0% (2011: 26.0%)
- Experian Simmons [4]: 31.6% (2011: 23.4%)
- Arbitron [5]: 20.2% (2011: 20.4%)
Susan Danaher, president and CEO of the DPAA, says that she believes that the DPAA Road Show for media planners and advertisers has definitely had an impact on the awareness. (Last year’s Road Show was for media buyers.)
“Digital place-based media is a sector on the rise,” Danaher says. “The trend lines are all positive, the most notable being a steadily increasing intent to incorporate DPb in media plans and a greater awareness of the availability of research to aid in the planning process. These two trends obviously go hand-in-hand, and their solid upward tracking bode well for our sector’s continued revenue growth in the years ahead.”
The survey was conducted online from May 1-May 29, 2012 by the DPAA among 1,761 media professionals employed at full-service and media service agencies around the country. Response rate was 11.9%
Planning strategies and case studies will be featured prominently in the DPAA’s 5th annual Digital Media Summit [6], to be held Oct. 16 at the New York Hilton. It precedes the Digital Investment Conference [7] being held the same week, Oct. 17 and 18, at the same location.