A up to date report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCooper advise that in the first 6 months of 2009, online marketing became the main advertising medium in the UK, overtaking TV marketing for the first time. In this period, Online Marketing grew by 4.6%. During the same period, the total amount of money spent on advertising overall was down 16.6%. Online marketing now has 23.5% of the market share whereas TV has 21.9%, down 17% from the same episode last year.

The current downturn is seen as a chief factor in speeding up a method which was actually imagined by the end of 2009 in which online advertising achieved the number 1 spot in the UK. The UK is at this time the world leader of online marketing. Users of the online services are increasing as the price of broadband is becoming cheaper and more households have faster broadband connections. Of these homes, more than half are wireless connections, making usability much easier. In these days of doubt, therefore, it is no surprise that advertisers are following this market which is more targetable, quantifiable and accountable than other media types.

Advertisers have to be more sensitive in this current situation of where their budget is spent and with Sky+ in many homes, people are opting to skip adverts as they playback their preferred television programmes. This could account for the decision of many to put their reduced budget on Search Engine Placement positioning for example, as opposed to the habitual TV advertising.

Thinkbox marketing director, Lindsey Clay, is of the view that now that online marketing is more middle aged, email promotion, classified advertising, display advertising and search advertising should be thought of separate fields, rather than all being joined under the one title of online advertising.

Of all the money spent on marketing online in the first half of 2009, over 60% was spent on paid for search advertising. This is very fashionable due to the fact that these adverts can aim at exactly the right customers for the advertisers’ goods. Most internet users are also recurrent users of search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, so it should be no surprise to us that businesses are choosing to spend their marketing budget on search advertising.

TV advertising has not gone away and as discussions are underway regarding marketing within TV programmes, known as product placement, this may well develop the TV advertising market again. However, now that online marketing has become widespread, and as advertisers see positive results, this is a market for the SEO company and it is positively worth investing.