The recent annual ‘Outlook’ report from American analyst firm PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) has suggested that the industry of advertising could soon take the internet as its primary focus as opposed to the long-standing dominant domain of television, a statistical move which could occur as soon as 2020.
‘Within seven years’ is the estimation of PwC in their new ‘Entertainment and Media Outlook’ report, focusing primarily on revenues likely to be generated through to 2018.
The 15th incarnation of the report, released earlier this week, claims that TV advertising is set to grow by generating $173.7b for the year 2014, before reaching a marker of $214.7b in 2018. The same period for the area of ‘internet advertising’, meanwhile, will see growth from $133b to $194.5b.
Comparatively, this represents a 5.5% and 10.7% rate of compounded annual interest in the respective markets, meaning that the rate given could see the ‘internet’ section take the lead as soon as 2020 – 10 years on from being half that of the revenue generated by their counterparts in TV.
For the advertising industry in ‘E&M’ as a whole, meanwhile (PwC describing this as ‘including’ the genres of TV, internet, film, music, video games, general, print, and outdoor advertising), it is believed that worldwide revenue is set to be $1.87 trillion for the year 2014, expanding towards a potential $2.27t as of 2018, with the USA remaining the largest national contributor to the global market, but with China edging past Japan in the final year as 2nd highest, with a number of developed and developing markets noted as key areas of investment for future commercial suppliers. For platforms, video games are cited as being an area to ‘watch out for’ in the coming years, amongst others.
With PwC’s predictions in such research barely beyond a few percentage points out, will the next mini-era of advertising be the one that causes the biggest shift in direction since TV took over from radio?
