MM&M released its annual DTC ad spend report for 2017 in the April issue. For the first time digital media spend numbers were made available via Kantar Media. The report estimates that DTC ad spend came in at around $6.3B for 2016 – a 5% increase from 2015 numbers.
Below is the media spend breakout by channel for the last two years. The full report with all the data can be found here.
Zenith Optimedia launched its global advertising forecasts for the next couple of years. To quote from the report: “This year internet advertising will overtake advertising in traditional television to become the world’s biggest advertising medium, accounting for 36.9% of total ad expenditure”. Full report is here.
Where is Healthcare on the Digital Map?
We used data from the two reports to visually compare healthcare media allocation in 2016 versus the industry in general.
Healthcare marketers only spent 8% of media dollars in digital while the industry in general spent over 1/3rd of their media budget in digital. There was a 17% increase in digital media budget across the board in 2016 while healthcare actually had a minor reduction in budget, according to the reports.
By 2019, digital media spend is expected to account for 42% of ad budget. Based on the data it looks like healthcare marketers have plenty of opportunity to grow and keep up with the momentum in digital that other industries have attained.
Digital Advertising Opportunities for Healthcare
Google continues to remain the top search engine advertising platform available to healthcare marketers. At inVentiv Health we continue to see strong performance and ROI with running paid search campaigns on Google. Every 1 in 20 searches on Google are healthcare related – that’s a few million searches for healthcare related information each day!
According to eMarketer’s forecasts, Google’s advertising revenues are expected to grow by 16% this year with a leading search market share of 78%. When it comes to mobile advertising, marketers spend 1/3rd of the media dollars on Google.
Facebook is the leader when it comes to display advertising, accounting for 40% of the overall display advertising market share and 25% of mobile media spend.
Social media advertising platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest continue to gain ad market share that healthcare should be leveraging.
The digital media industry is expected to grow at a double-digit rate over the next couple of years. Will the healthcare industry manage to up to the ante in digital and catch-up?
Abdul Khimani is the Director of Analytics at Palio, an inVentiv Health agency. Abdul has worked in the digital marketing industry for 10 years on a diversified portfolio of businesses. He is an expert at crafting measurement solutions for healthcare and pharmaceutical clients. He plays a key role in shaping the digital strategy for clients and has a strong handle on marketing technology products including CRM campaign management, digital advertising, customer database, and analytics reporting platforms. He has a master’s degree in integrated marketing from New York University.
