US Digital Advertising Industry Analysis
Digital advertising in the U.S. has come a long way, with many companies now focusing a great deal of their marketing on the kind of targeted marketing that digital advertising allows. In the retail industry, digital marketing has increased from $15.83 billion spent in 2016 to a projected $27.58 billion spent in 2019. The automotive industry has nearly doubled its expenditure on digital advertising since 2016, when it spent $9.14 billion as compared to a projected $15.65 billion for 2019. The same goes for financial services, which spent $8.78 in 2016 and is expected to spend $15.25 billion on digital marketing in 2019. The entertainment industry spent $3.45 billion on digital marketing in 2016 and for 2019, it is expected to spend $6.64 billion. In the Appendix are more figures by industry for digital ad spending in the U.S. What the statistics show, however, is that digital ad spending is increasing year over year across all industries as more and more people use the Internet as a primary source of information and news (eMarketer, 2018).
Part of the reason for this growing trend is that more Internet users and consumers are buying mobile phones—smart phones and iPhones—which allow them to browse the Internet virtually anywhere at any time. So it is no more a matter of simply having to sit at one’s desk and browse. Today, one can browse on the go. This means that...
Advertisers have to go where the eyes are going, and so digital advertising is growing and every industry shows evidence of that.
Mobile advertising is the main source of growth, too. As Beattie (2018) notes, “while U.S. digital advertising has grown significantly, mobile advertising has been outpacing all other platforms. In 2018, it will account for 69.9% of all digital advertising. Holding 33.9% share of all of the U.S. advertising spend, mobile will overtake TV, leading the ad space. That figure is projected to reach 47.9% by 2022. One of the key drivers of this is mobile commerce.” In other words, people are using the mobile phones to do their shopping today. Mobile phone advertising, therefore, is the primary focus of digital advertisers in all industries because that is where the eyes of consumers are most fixed.
Influencer marketing is also on the rise. The reason for this shift to influencer marketing is that more people are using ad blockers or ignoring digital advertising altogether. They are not interest in traditional or conventional ads because they do not trust them and do not view them as informational. Today’s generation wants to know from peers which products are good and which are bad—so they are turning more and more to influencer marketing.…
