Digital Media Boosted by Mobile and Social Media Compared to our previous forecasts published in June 2013, the biggest game changer was the rise of social media and, more specifically mobile social media. In the last 18 months, social media usage has migrated towards portable devices and platforms at a faster rate than most anticipated. By ‘portable’ we refer to mobile phones and tablets. It needs to be stressed that portable devices are increasingly used in the home and not just on the move; they’re not only filling a media-free space in consumers’ days, they’re also gradually replacing laptops and PC usage in the home. In fact, they have become the default devices for casual internet usage at home and the dominant platform for digital social media usage everywhere. Even more significantly, social and mobile seem to have found each other in perfect chemistry in 2013. The impressive success of tablets in the Western world and the rapid penetration of feature phones and smartphones in the developing world have contributed to this rapid shift in consumer usage. At the same time, social media owners (Facebook and Twitter most significantly) have introduced ad formats specifically matched to those portable devices that have met with instant success among marketers without alienating users. As a result, the share of advertising revenues derived by Facebook from ad insertions on portable devices has increased from 12% in 2012 to a projected 50% globally in the third quarter of 2013. Globally we believe social media advertising grew by 58% this year, to $9.1bn, of which $2.9bn from mobile social (+ 300%).
The huge growth of social media advertising spending is partly incremental (growing the digital media pie as it offers new opportunities to some categories of advertisers) and partly substitutive because it is fed by budgets that would otherwise grow non-social display formats or search. Overall, we believe it is slightly incremental and that is partly why we have seen stronger digital media growth than anticipated in 2013 (nearly +16% compared to our previous forecast of +13.4% in June). Globally the $118 billion spent with digital media represents 24% of global advertising revenues.