Earned Media to Grow Most in 2010, Survey Finds

Earned media spending will see the biggest increases in spending in 2010, a new survey of brand marketing professionals by the Society of Digital Agencies finds. "Earned media" refers to refers to favorable publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising, as opposed to paid media, which refers to publicity gained through advertising. Increasing use of social media accounts for much of the change.

About 81 percent of the brand executives expect an increase in digital projects in 2010, and half will be moving dollars from traditional to digital budgets. Further, more than 75 percent think the current economy will push more allocations to digital formats.

Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, for example.

“Unpaid, earned, proprietary” media spending has seen the sharpest rise, with nearly 20 percent of respondents reporting increases of more than 30 percent.

Newspapers Not Dead Yet

But the trend line is clear enough. Newspaper advertising has been declining for decades.

But changes of this sort, where some older ways of doing things are replaced by newer ways, can take quite some time to play out, and will inevitably create new opportunities.

"Long distance," for example, has been in a long rate-per-minute decline, but usage has continued to climb. That meant the strategic task for every AT&T executive for years was simply to moderate the decline to the extent possible and prepare for some new business model.

The difference between long distance calling and newspaper advertising revenue is that newspaper ad volume is not rising, as long distance calling continues to do.

But the newspaper ad market is sizable enough that it still offers opportunity for players such as Yahoo, which has a deal with seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country.

Yahoo is sharing content, advertising and technology, initially by newspapers posting their classified jobs ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, while newspapers use HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

Over time, the intention is to optimize newspaper content for search and indexing on Yahoo.

More Online than Print by 2011

Online advertising sales will overtake print advertising by 2011, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson. VSS forecasts annual online advertising growth of more than 21 percent, reaching $62 billion in 2011, compared to print advertising's forecasted $60B.

TV ad revenues will still hold the top spot at a predicted $80B in 2011. "The path of online advertising and newspaper advertising is a continuation of what we’ve been observing for many years, but it is finally getting to the point where the lines will cross," says VSS's James Rutherfurd.

The study notes that in 2007, the amount of time spent reading online will overtake time spent reading newspapers for the first time. Overall media use was down 0.5 percent in 2006 to 3,530 hours per person, while workplace media usage jumped 3.2 percent to 260 hours per employee per year.