Hints of such expenditure have been emerging for the past few weeks, but the latest figures now confirm the strong marketing climate that is present in the United Kingdom. Ever on the pulse, bigmouthmedia reported on one such indication in November, in an article about Google's prospects of earning £900m from UK Advertising this year.
The UK's status as a technology saturated country with a strong national identity and focus may have helped build its thriving internet advertising market. After all, most advertising campaigns in the UK are run on a national basis, in stark contrast to the regional advertising that is prevalent in the US. The advertising mindset in the UK is also much better suited to a medium that is accessible from anywhere in the world. American companies may not wish to jump into online advertising as readily because they won't have a great deal of control over where their ads will appear.
This primarily comes down to the variety of ways in which online marketing is carried out in the two countries. In the United States, advertising is mainly sold to online networks, which then filter advertisements through to their member sites. In the United Kingdom, however, online advertising is carried out in a much more straightforward manner, with most companies working directly with search engines or through a professional search agency who can manage Pay-Per-Click advertisements for advertisers.
The falling television advertising spend in the UK has been put down to movement into the online market. Internet marketing can be easily tracked, specific users can be targeted and it's a far cheaper model than that of television advertising. Nearly 50 per cent of UK households have access to broadband internet from home and, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, an average of 23 hours per week are spent online by Britons. All of these factors contribute to the effectiveness and attractiveness of online marketing to advertisers in Britain.
However, the factors are not really that different in the US. According to Nielsen Media Research, 44 per cent of US households have broadband internet, but only use their computers for an average of 14 hours a week. Even so, the country is said to have an untapped market of over 130 million people, primarily because US advertisers have not, to date, been targeting these consumers as effectively as their UK counterparts.
