I attended Lead 2013, the Advertising Association summit yesterday.
Here are the 10 most interesting things I heard…
- The Advertising Association has produced a report in association with Deloitte which shows how advertising fuels the UK economy. The conclusion is that £16bn is spent on advertising each year, but that this drives £100bn contribution to UK GDP. It’s an excellent report, clear and well produced – everyone in our industry should read it.
- David Abraham of Channel 4 spoke about the challenges facing agencies. He said “one of the challenges is how to integrate and co-ordinate all of the specialist skills – in the 80s everything was all under one roof and so the prospect of reuniting agency services might be ahead of us”. Anyone else looking for this best in class under one roof approach should click here.
- There were some interesting stats to illustrate the challenge of monetising online readers. The Guardian has 200,000 print readers and is the UK’s 8th biggest national paper. The Guardian Online has 4m readers and is one of the top 2 or 3 most read media sites in the world. And yet the advertising revenues from the paper are THREE TIMES higher than from online.
- The IAB said that this year smartphone ownership will be through the 75% barrier. A good stat to quote if you get any objections to doing a smartphone campaign on the grounds that it won’t have a broad enough reach.
- In 2008, 7% of travel, finance and retail searches were on phones or tablets. This year THE MAJORITY of searches for these categories will be on mobile.
- Many brands are lagging way behind the shift to mobile. The majority of digital ad impressions viewed are now mobile and yet only 7% of digital ad spend is mobile.
- The IAB presented a great chart to show the rise in dual screening. It showed the level of social buzz before, during and after football matches in World Cup 2010 and Euro 2012. In 2010 the chart was V shaped – interaction dropped as people settled down to focus on the match. In 2012 the chart was the opposite – ^ shaped – the peak of interaction was DURING the match as people commented and talked about the action as it unfolded.
- There was a good session on the link between outdoor and mobile. Given that your phone knows where you are, there is the opportunity to do location based campaigns depending on which bus stop poster you are standing next to. E.g. use NFC to point your phone at the site and get content depending on which city you are in.
- Several world class mobile campaigns were shared. Two worth watching if you haven’t seen already are Band Aid (The Muppets) and Google Project Re Brief (I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke).
- Culture, Media & Sport secretary Maria Miller, herself a former advertising executive herself, made the point that the advertising sector is worth more than the UK’s TV and film industries, and more than the architecture and design sectors combined.
