By Scott Gillum
We just finished our annual assessment of B2B Advertising spend in the Financial Services industry (for high resolution video click here and select watch in high quality). Results for 2007 showed that as an industry, Financial Services firms reduced their B2B advertising spend by close to 15% over the prior year.
- The mix of the total advertising spend was similar to the prior year with a slight increase in internet spend (9%, similar to what we saw in our Digital Marketing in FS research) and radio.
- The mix of print advertising as a percent of total spend (typical 30% of total spend) shifted to magazine (up to 14% from 7%) at the expense of newspapers (12% down from 21% in '06).
- Local newspapers were the hardest hit, with only half of the advertising dollars from the previous year. Consumer magazines picking up much that spend, one of the few bright spots from last year.
- The internet continues its streak of growing as a percent of total spend up to 14% from 13%. A milestone was reached by CapOne, which invested more advertising dollars on the Internet than in Network TV which is the first time ever we've seen that. Could this be a trend…yea, I think so.
In the Insurance industry no real change…unfortunately. Overall spend was only down slightly from $48M to $46M with no real change in the mix.
- Local newspapers lost ground (14% of total spend compared to 19% the previous year) with magazines picking up that shift similar to what we saw in Retail Banking, but for the most part all other categories remained the same.
- Advertising spend on the internet was a pathetic 2%...the same as 2006. While the rest of the Financial Services industry is shifting dollars out of TV and into the Internet, the Insurance industry continues to buck the trend, in fact, TV as a percent of total spend increased last year from 60 to 62% of the budget.
I’ll try to provide a reason for this (if i can) in my next blog.
