Last month, Mary Meecker from Kleiner Perkins came out with a presentation on Internet trends that made a few eyes pop open.
The big one that I took away was this… the top 200 leading marketers across all industries (the big players like P+G, makes of Tide, Pampers etc, Gillette) spent less than 2.6% of their total budgets online.
If you’re of the old school of advertising, you may look at this and think “What’s wrong with that?”
Here’s the other side of the story – that which gives this statistic relevance. The consumers that these companies are targeting spend close to 30% of their time on the Internet.
The study validates what I’ve been feeling for years – big companies are still years behind consumer trends. They’re out of touch with the consumer’s habits, and they’re at best ambivalent and at worst fearful of the new online channels. They’re spending the vast majority of budget in old, outdated, offline channels and ignoring the fact that online marketing is here and it’s here to stay.
That gap between 2.6% of budget and 30% of consumer attention online represents $50B in marketing opportunity that is untapped. It’s the equivalent of 2.4 minutes of blank commercials in every hour of TV, or 14 blank pages appearing in a fashion magazine. It’s a gap that is simply screaming for big players to step in and seize the chance to connect with consumers one-on-one, in their homes, and sitting beside their credit cards.
