As you plan your marketing budgets for 2011 it’s important to look at the trends over the past few years and here’s a good chart from eMarketer that will help you see how consumers spend their time.
This report would be much better if they separated TV and video into two categories, as it’s difficult to allocate ad dollars to videos, but at least this report tells us television is still very important.
Other takeaways here are consistent with what we’ve known for sometime. Consumers continue to spend more time on the Internet and more recently mobile at the expense of newspapers and magazines. It’s not clear from this chart but in 2010 adults spent as much time on mobile as they did reading newspapers and magazines combined. Now that information should somehow be reflected in how marketers spend their advertising dollars.
Most marketers have radio, television and newspaper advertising figured out but are still weak on what to do and how to advertise on the Internet and mobile. Especially when it comes to local advertising and co-op dollars where the value of localization can best play itself out online. On the Internet and mobile we know where the consumers are physically and can through technology combine the local retailer’s story with the national brand message and allocate those dollars to likely consumers in markets where we have our best retailers. It doesn’t get any better than that.