October 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 | By Justin Pearse

The month started with a bang with the news that online ad spend had overtaken TV. The IAB reported spend in the first half of this year grew 4.6% to £1.75bn, taking it to a market share of 23.5%, above TV’s 21.9%. This leap has been long yearned for by the online ad industry and was unquestionably something to celebrate. The traditional TV industry reacted predictably, pointing out the flaws in such a comparison. While they had a point, this isn’t about a media battle, merely a recognition of the internet’s emergence as a mature ad channel worthy of sitting alongside its much older cousins.

Ironically, the following week brought news the TV industry could perhaps rightly hold up as evidence of the internet’s immaturity. The search for a common online currency has been a tortuous one but it appeared to be nearing an end with UKOM”s planned January launch. This never being an industry to make things easy, though, an alternative currency was put forward by ComScore that combined panel data with publishers’ server logs. The interesting thing about this system is that it has already launched in Canada, with the Canadian branch of the IAB.

Measurement remains one of the most challenging aspects of online advertising, despite its promise as the first truly accountable media. The latest struggle is to measure the buzzword of the moment, engagement. Procter & Gamble made a brave start recently with a model rewarding publishers for engaged consumers. Then this month Polydor launched a cost-per-engagement model (CPE joining the roster of online ad acronyms) which rewards publishers for readers who go beyond just viewing an ad to take actions such as watching a video.

It has been a long time since we had a bad e-Christmas. For the early years of this century new media age’s January headlines were taken up with cataloguing the failed promises of festive ecommerce. That now seems like a distant nightmare as ecommerce has become second nature to a large part of the population. But as our cover story highlighted, the continued postal strikes risk severely damaging consumer confidence in online shopping this Christmas, as we also discuss in this month’s nma podcast.

On a cheerier note, our final issue of the month found Sky reporting real revenues not merely column inches. Apps are the most hyped of mobile developments this year so it’s heartening to see them deliver concrete business benefit. Sky has recorded 1.8m app downloads and is already generating tens of thousands of pounds of revenue from display and pre-roll advertising. It’s now to bolster this by selling FA Premier League goal highlights in its Sky Sports Football Score Centre iPhone app. Maybe this time the hype is justified.

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