Digital ads just had their best (and worst) year ever

We’re about to see a massive opportunity for brands that are willing to be creative

Digital advertising companies just had their best year ever, but pretty universally, digital advertisers are reporting worse performance than ever. What's going on here?

First, let's look at the numbers. Across the board, digital media spends are up, and up big. Here are the numbers being projected for 2021:

• Google: ~$200B +69% from 2019
• Facebook: ~$29B +56%
• YouTube: ~$28B +84%
• Snapchat: ~$4B +116%
• Twitter: ~$4B +87%
• LinkedIn: ~$4B +97%
• Spotify: ~$1.3B +110%

Next, let's take a look at a recent tweet from a prominent digital media buyer:

If that's any indication of how advertisers are feeling right now (and I believe that it is), there's something really broken in this relationship between media and buyers.

HERE'S OUR TAKE

• The global pandemic shut down nearly all forms of offline advertising
• It also caused a creative disconnect, where teams no longer spent hours together coming up with original ideas
• The biggest platforms have invested Billions in their ad services, making it incredibly easy to spend huge budgets, even if you don't have great creative
• They've invested just as much in their "analytics" tools that, of course, tell us how great their ads are doing, meanwhile obscuring organic and other conversion sources
• The result: Of course we'd want to shove all of our cash at Google and Facebook

THE GOOD NEWS

Where there's inefficiency there's opportunity. When most advertisers are short on creativity, the brands that take a minute to think differently and invest in creative solutions stand out more than ever.

As we move back into physical spaces with each other, those spontaneous ideas will start to spark again, and as events, activations, and other offline interactions come back, so too will the opportunities to connect the digital and physical worlds together. The rest of this year will be a hotbed of creative opportunity, and the brands that embrace it will pull away from the ones that remain convinced that the magical algorithms will deliver their ROAS.

Of course, digital ads will continue to play an important role in the ways that we distribute creativity and will help to convert the bottom-of-funnel demand that all of those creative ideas have generated. The question each of us has the opportunity to ask ourselves right now is: Are we doing the creative work that it takes to differentiate our brands, or are we choosing the increasingly inefficient path of least resistance?

Data and rant inspired by this Linkedin post from Rand Fishkin.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting