ClickConfirmation and Global Ad Investment Trends and Forecasts for 2018
A new report from Juniper Research has found that advertisers will lose an estimated $19 billion in fraudulent activities next year, equivalent to $51 million per day. This figure, representing advertising on online and mobile devices, will continue to rise, reaching $44 billion by 2022. With billions of dollars up for grabs in the loss department, there is a whole world of opportunity and money to be made in the fraud prevention space as well.
Whether you are an affiliate marketer, running an online e-commerce site, or simply accepting credit cards for anything… your business and its reputation are currently on the line. With so much focus on data leads and fraudulent activity as of lately, for most brands, it’s not a question of if and how such attacks and payment fraud might take place — it’s more of a question of when.
The good news is that there are plenty of precautions and security solutions in place to help weed out obvious or weak spots within a business and how they manage and collect user data. One such solution is ClickConfirmation, which provides traffic verification services for online advertisers and publishers. Its services help strengthen the online advertising ecosystem by flagging, vetting, and filtering suspicious traffic. This helps increase advertiser ROI and publisher transparency. ClickConfirmation creates a more secure and transparent digital advertising experience by helping advertisers and publishers differentiate between human and bot traffic.
However, it’s not enough to simply sign up for a service and consider your business or brand safe. You also need to stay updated with the latest trends, security updates, and also keeping an eye on how other businesses around the world are protecting themselves in the process.
This is exactly what we will be looking at today, while also covering some of the recent trends and forecasts for 2018 in digital marketing, television advertising and how Google, Amazon, and Facebook continue to change everything.
Online advertising and traffic verification are more important than ever as advertising grows globally.
In 2018, the U.S., China, Argentina, Japan, India, and the U.K are anticipated to cumulatively drive 68% of incremental ad investment. In this post, we explore global media channels’ ad investment activity in the past years, trends and forecasts according to various countries — all of which makes for a great follow up to our recent affiliate marketing in Asia article.
According to a Global Advertising Forecast Report by GroupM, the media investment group of WPP, 2016’s growth was primarily stemmed from digital ad sales (which increased by 17%) whereas offline media ad sales (these channels include: linear TV, print, radio, and out-of-home) were relatively flat as they increased by 0.3%. If it wasn’t for the cumulative cyclical spending, which benefits mainly television, offline media sales would have slumped by roughly 2.0%, corresponding to 2015’s figures.
- TV to Lose One Point of Share Per Year in 2017 and 2018
- Google and Facebook to Win 186% of Incremental Digital Investment in 2017
Likewise, when looking back at 2016, global net media owners advertising revenues increased by 5.7% to $493 billion (this is a 4.0% increase from in 2015). 2016 was the year that experienced the strongest growth since 2010 (which exhibited a post-recession recovery of 8.8% increase). In 2017, most of the growth emanated from North America as the US market (accounting for 37% of global ad dollars) reported its most prosperous growth rate in 12 years where growth decreased in several emerging regions. Such emerging regions include: Central and Eastern Europe (with a 6.0% increase), Latin America (with a 5.5% increase), Asia-Pacific (with a 5.3% increase) and Western Europe (with a 3.9% increase).
Television
Investment in television will globally grow by 0.4% in 2017 and 2.2% in 2018; with that said, TV will lose one share point this year and an additional one in 2018. The television medium in China is showing signs of a slow down as they recently disclosed that TV is growing 3% this year and 4% in 2018, with share stable (41%). According to GroupM (the media investment group of WPP),“we know that time spent with TV content remains healthy, but monetizing those hours gets harder as audiences diffuse across platforms more quickly than the industry can create measurement solutions”.
Digital
Overall digital investment growth is expected to reach 11.5% in 2017 and 11.3% next year. Moreover, its share is anticipated to increase from 34.1% this year to 36.4% in 2018. With that said, the digital channel growth (excluding China) is showing signs of a slowdown (10.6% in 2017 and 10.5% in 2018), however GroupM believes digital investment will exceed traditional TV in seventeen markets by year’s end in Australia, Canada, Denmark, China, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, Netherlands, NewZealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the U.K. GroupM also expects digital investment will surpass TV in the U.S. by 2020.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon
Towards the end of Q3 of 2017, Google reported ad revenues of $24B while Facebook reported $10B.
GroupM suggests that Facebook and Google will account for 84% of all digital investment in 2017 (excluding China). Similarly, these two organizations will account for a whopping 186% of digital growth in 2017. This is an exceptionally dangerous environment for other the digital publishers in the industry. Not to mention that Amazon is also on its way to becoming one of the leaders in the digital ad investment field. This is because Amazon’s on-platform search and display advertising along with their off-platform advertising revenues are somewhere in the low single-digit billions.
So what does this mean for affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs?
In the big scheme of things… not much. As usual, affiliate marketers and sole-entrepreneurs will continue to adapt and change their business models to cater to the movements and world around them. In most cases, many businesses and brands have already made the transition from TV to the internet, which is no surprise.
The bigger question is how well Google, Facebook, and Amazon continue to not only change the way we use and buy things online but also how they can monopolize the industry and single-handedly influence and change advertising or their own rules at any given time.
No matter what industry you might be focused on, fraud is always going to play a factor. As long as you continue to stay ahead of the latest trends and always make sure your customer data is safe, you will rest easy at night. It’s might better to have the necessary precautions in place beforehand than to try and clean up the mess after something has already happened.
