Digital Advertising’s Growth Spurt in 2022: Growing Pains or Gains?

3 Min Read

“This may be one of the fastest growth rates in the history of advertising,” said Brian Wieser, GroupM’s global president of business intelligence. The global agency released their latest end-of-year ad forecast, which anticipates the international ad industry’s growth rate this year to reach 22.5 percent versus its original 19.2 percent estimate. Next year is looking to be a bullish year, with a 9.7 percent forecasted growth up from its prior 8.8 percent forecast. The research also revealed that digital advertising accounting for 64.4 percent of all advertising in 2021, up from 60.5 percent in 2020…and television advertising is forecast to increase 11.7 percent in 2021, up from June’s estimate of 9.3 percent. We explore what’s behind this growth, and the challenges that ensue in the new year.

Marketing’s Mindset Shift to Performance

Recent survey data released by WARC, a leading data and insights firm that provides the latest expertise and stats to marketers worldwide, revealed that post pandemic changes in consumer behavior and data privacy will be top of mind in the new year; and prompted marketers to rethink their performance marketing budgets (and reevaluate how they restructure their marketing teams in the new year). Two-fifths (41%) of marketers will shift the balance of investment in 2022 towards performance marketing efforts and explore new solutions that will prepare them for the post-cookie world and also drive meaningful performance outcomes. And, while ad spending on certain channels like linear TV have fallen flat (eMarketer projects spend to plateau from 2021 onwards), it’s given rise to new digital advertising channels like Connected TV to play a bigger role in marketer’s budgets and mindshare.

Flexibility is 2022’s Running Theme

Online platforms benefited the most between the early-pandemic to post-pandemic recovery period, with Connected TV ranked as one of the top three digital channels (next to e-commerce and social media), showing a 157.6% growth. Additionally streaming has seen the biggest increase in consumption in 2021, and  together with music streaming makes up almost half of the total increase in daily media time. This change in media consumption, together with the emphasis on performance, has forced advertisers to rethink their marketing mix in the new year, especially as brands pump more investment into their e-commerce initiatives. Connected TV advertising, while being a relatively ‘new’ player in the digital advertising space, has carved a niche for its ability to provide effective and impactful campaigns that can be set up and deployed at speed.

Industry leaders like MNTN have made TV advertising more accessible for advertisers of all sizes and industries to serve highly targeted ads at scale, and its recent Creative-as-a-Subscription™ offering is taking the idea of ‘creative flexibility’ to the next level, making it easy to produce TV creative and serve their campaigns from a single source. “The process of creating and distributing TV ads can be fractured and frustrating,” said MNTN CEO Mark Douglas, “Creative-as-a-Subscription is a solution to this very real pain point, a way for brands to get great creative on the fastest-growing performance TV platform in a way that’s simple and affordable.”

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