Follow the Money in 2020

How should we allocate our limited media budget for 2020? As we kick off 2020 media budget discussions, I’m a big fan of following the dollars and your customers time vs what people say/claim.

Dollars continue moving to digital channels:

614b5a29a75baa8b9488bed0 digital vs traditional ad spending 1

In general, budgets have flowed to mobile, driven by where your customer spends more of their limited free time:

614b5a2920f00031ca144038 daily hours spent with digital media per adult user usa
614b5a2ab32cad160119f2fa time spent in media vs advertising spending

Google still dominates the majority of the digital media spend in the US followed by Facebook with everyone else combined being a rounding error:

614b5a2ad0df436666bea51d digital media spend chart per platform

Your customers are spending less of their time on social media:

614b5a2a6fd11e64982e7ea2 daily time spent on social media global 1

So where are they spending time: Online Video and the media dollars have followed in 2019:

614b5a2a7588e5bc8654bae1 average dollar amount spent on digital mobile video advertising

One might be tempted to spend your 2020 media budget on Video in Facebook or Instagram but with the relative high CPM’s you see they capture only 22% of the media dollars:

614b5a2ad49de5a47eee1657 average percent digital video budget allocations to each channel 1

Where are these dollars coming from? Print, Radio, TV:

614b5a2a5372e17004810a89 us traditional media ad spending growth 2019 1

How should we then allocate our limited 2020 media budget? Ask these three questions:

  1. Where do your customers spend their time?
  2. On which digital/social/video platforms can you maximize your CPM’s to get more frequency as it takes more impressions to get your message across in today’s hyper connected environment?
  3. What old assumptions do I want to test this quarter? Maybe it is YouTube, LinkedIn, or Waze won’t/don’t work for my brand. Test it. As we find clients are often surprised with the results.

The media world continues to change quickly and testing your assumptions is how we stay ahead in 2020.

Need help testing?

Grab a time to chat.