Advertising market grows thanks to mobile

Over the next three years, 36 percent of additional advertising investment will go to mobile advertising.In the coming year, the Winter Olympics, the soccer World Cup and the US midterm elections will boost the advertising market. With the strong forecasts for 2015 and 2016, the ZenithOptimedia assumption that the (southern) European markets will recover steadily and that no new crisis will break out.The advertising market is also picking up in Switzerland, albeit at a much less dynamic rate. "The current year will still end with a growth rate of around 1.0 percent, but for 2014 we expect growth of 1.6 percent, which will continue in 2015 and 2016 in moderate growth rates of 0.7 and 0.8 percent," explains Beat Krebs, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Schweiz AG. "The big advertisers are often multinational companies that invest more in emerging markets where relevant market share gains are still possible. Against this background, it is difficult to build on previous growth rates. "The strongest global growth driver for advertising is mobile. With the increasing spread of smartphones and tablets, media consumption via these devices is also growing. For the first time in 20 years, a new channel is emerging that increases media consumption without cannibalizing other media channels. As a result, 36 percent of additional advertising investment will go to mobile advertising over the next three years. Television will be the second biggest growth driver, attracting 34 percent of additional advertising dollars, followed by desktop online (25 percent). Despite considerable growth rates, mobile remains a manageable channel for the time being, accounting for just 2.7 percent of global advertising investment in 2013. By 2016, however, this figure is expected to rise to 7.7 percent, which would mean that mobile would overtake radio, magazines and outdoor advertising to become the fourth largest advertising medium. "In Switzerland in particular, mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular," says Krebs. "Smartphone penetration will rise from 54 percent this year to 78 percent in 2016. For tablets, it will rise from 19 percent to 30 percent. These are top international figures. However, we in Switzerland are still lagging behind global developments in terms of the acceptance of mobile forms of advertising in the advertising market. Comparatively little money is still flowing into mobile forms of advertising. The Swiss market has a lot of potential here. "The same applies to online advertising in Switzerland as a whole. For example, the forecast for Germany in 2016 sees online advertising ahead of newspaper advertising for the first time. In Switzerland, this constellation is far from being foreseeable in the near future, despite continuous growth in online advertising investments and continuing losses by newspapers.