Friday, October 9, 2009

Canadians Love the Web but Online advertizing lags Canada's adoption: Why?

Canada has had one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world.

More than half of the adult population is on Facebook in Canada. Nearly 70% of Canadians watch videos online, while the average Internet user in Canada spends about 60 hours online a month.

In fact, English speaking Canadians aged 18-34 spend more than a third of their time online, more than they spend listening to radio, watching television, or reading newspapers according to Interactive Advertizing Bureau of Canada (IAB).

Across all groups Canadians are spending an increasing amount of time online. But the advertising dollars are not following them.

Although online advertising revenue has quadrupled over the past 5 years to move than $1.6B in 2009, spending on digitial advertizing accounted for only 11% of the overall marketing budgets of Canadian companies. Other studies have projected lower penetration numbers.

In the USA, markets spend as much as 14% of their overall budgets on online marketing, while the number is closer to 20% in Australia and as high as 23% in the UK.

Canada has world class internet penetration. It is in the leading markets in the world. What is fascinating is that Canada is not as competitive a business market, which basically suggests that there is not as many businesses online because they are not competing for share against each other, or there are not enough businesses competing in certain areas.

What is clear is that the online adoption of businesss is not on part with the online adoption of consumers, which is a challenge for Canda in the long term.

Why is this?

1.) Are we not innovating fast enough in internet web based models?
2.) Are we just too conservative?

My perspective is that our consumer purchasing base is ready but our business executives are not moving their advertising spending dollars to the web rapidly enough - this is partially generational leadership web know-how, but also the risk adversity that Canadians often personify.

These are some of the innovation challenges for increased knowledge and simply internalizing the dominant form of advertizing reach is web - centric..... What would happen if you moved 80% of all your precious advertizing dollars to the web......?

Who is up for this challenge?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is a very interesting post, and the comments are also fantastic to read. I’ll have to have a little re-think about my own contact form on our new website, as this poses some interesting questions!
online marketing

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