Interesting perspective on the size of the global advertising market from Martin Sorrell at WPP at this week’s 4A Transform event. In a discussion about whether the Internet has created more value than it has destroyed, (he argues it has created more), he gave the following numbers that represent WPP’s forecast advertising spend in 2012.
As WPP manages approximately $75 billion of marketing $ around the world, he gets a pretty good insight.
WPP Ad Spend Forecast 2012
- Twitter (2011) – $6,000,000 (He didn’t know 2012 number, perhaps inferring it wasn’t big enough for him to care about)
- Facebook – $400,000,000 (Up from $200 million in 2011 – 100% growth).
- Google – $2,000,000,000 (Up from $1.2 billion in 2011)
- News Corp – $2,500,000,000
- Other – $70,094,000,000
- Total Spend – $75,000,000,000
WPP Total Forecast Ad Spend 2012 Martin Sorrell
It is a bit hard to see Twitter on that chart so here is that chart without the, ‘Other’…
WPP Total Forecast Ad Spend Twitter Google Facebook & News Corp 2012, Martin Sorrell
Oops. It is still a bit hard to see Twitter on that chart…
To be honest, if advertising spend on Twitter rockets, it will lose its allure pretty quickly. It is annoying enough to get the occasional promoted tweet. If the monetisation strategy means that there has to be more advertising, it will get annoying rapidly and it probably can’t increase the price of the inventory much. Anecdotal evidence suggests that spending money on twitter can drive conversation but much less conversion. It will be interesting to see how Twitter’s commercialisation plays out.
