Recently I engaged with a comment on LinkedIn to the effect that,  as far as I could see, Advertising spend on Television was showing no signs of slowing up. The argument I was replying too was along the lines that Advertisers were abandoning Television for digital and that Social ad spend would overtake TV advertisements by as early as 2020.

The figures do support the argument that by 2020, social ad spend will occupy 29.7% of the total UK ad spend, compared to the 17.8% share held by broadcast TV, that’s an 11.9% difference in expenditure.

What factors are driving this: prior to the late 1990s, media buying was generally carried out by the media department of an advertising agency and it was around this time that the split between creative agencies and media agencies known as ‘unbundling’ started. In 1999, WPP Group created MindShare, then in 2003 consolidated even further its position with the formation of GroupM, which is now the number one media investment management company in the world, what this led too was behavioural analytics, and Agent Based Modelling, which is a computational modelling program, in other words, making use of information to supply you, the end user with what the model sees as areas of interest or spend etc. It’s a big boys spend arena, the new doggie in the window must have, but clearly accounting for the 11.9% difference in spending on TV, which doesn’t come with all those selective marketing information cherries that Agent Based Modelling does.

How does all this big boy stuff affect the creative media artist, clearly a greater understanding of the requirements of: Tablets, Phones, internet, etc known as Multi-Device is now required. Traditional media such as radio, TV, magazines, newspapers etc isn’t going anywhere just now. But the money is on the new kid on the block.