Recently, we posted a mash-up of articles on the upset win by Creigh Deeds, candidate for Governor of Virginia, in the Democratic primary called, “The Google Blast: A Secret Weapon for Savvy Campaigns?” Many of the articles on the race mentioned the sizable chunk of the campaign’s advertising budget used for their Google ad buy. Now there are more indications that online advertising could become a critically important weapon in the political campaign arsenal.

Joe Mandese of the Media Post News writes in “Online Ad Spending Rises at Double-Digit Rates, Gains Share Vs. All Other Media”:

Despite the global economic recession’s drag on advertising budgets, the growth in online ad spending appears to be defying expectations, and is expanding at double-digit rates, according to the latest quarterly forecast from Publicis’ ZenithOptimedia Group. The agency estimates that Internet ad spending will expand 10.1% in 2009, an increase of more than 1.5 percentage points over its last forecast in April.

…

Based on current trends, the agency projects Internet ad spending will rise to $56.8 billion this year, or 12.6% of the global advertising economy. That means the Internet will pick up more than two points of worldwide advertising share, this year, and its momentum is only expected to accelerate.

“By 2011 we expect it to account for 15.1% of all ad expenditures, up from 10.5% in 2008,” the report predicts. “Most of this growth will come from paid search…In the U.S., we predict search advertising to grow 20.0% in 2009, while traditional display grows 3.0% and classified grows just 1.8%.”

General economic and business trends, such as this increase on online ad spending, tend to precede changes in the world political campaigning by a few years. But if these predictions on where online ad spending is heading are correct, campaigns in 2010 and beyond will be paying a lot more attention — and dollars — on Internet advertising. And they will be spending more for online ads at the expense of other media buys.

To our readers with experience in campaign budgeting, what share of the media budget (and/or the Web budget) has online advertising traditionally claimed? Now, pull out your crystal ball and take a shot at the slice of the pie in five years. Or even next year. Could we see 15 percent of campaigns’ advertising expenditures going to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Facebook?

Tags: advertising budgets, Google Ads, online ads

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 5:30 am and is filed under eCampaigning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.