Canadian Online Spend Announced

Marketing Magazine announced the Canadian digital spend for 2007. Some highlights:

• Canadian online ad revenues reached over $1.2 billion last year (an increase of 38%)
• Search continues to represent the biggest part of the pie with revenue $478 million
  
• Display ads are number 2 at $432 million (who even looks at them?)
  
• Auto spent the largest chunk of their annual budgets (16%) with Financial (11%) and Technology (10%) coming in the top 3

What does this mean? A lot.

Search, for most clients in Canada, is still lagging behind in terms of their overall priorities. How many clients have you worked with who spend the majority of their timing thinking about search vs. campaign creative? Although the spend is getting there, we are still a long way behind the US.

Online spend will continue to grow but instead of pouring dollars into the media, Marketers will demand more from their agencies - especially in terms of campaign optimization and reporting.

To that point, I'll leave you with a quote from a co-worker (in regards to the importance of optimization):

"The campaign you start with should never be the one you end with."