Deloitte study: in-store marketing growing faster than Internet

Deloitte Consulting just released the summary of a report conducted for the Grocery Manufacturer's Association with a truly remarkable finding. As neatly summarized in this Ad Age article, they claim that in-store advertising is growing at a faster rate than internet advertising.

The report finds that "shopper marketing has grown from 3% of the overall marketing budgets of the 19 package-goods manufacturers surveyed in 2004 to 6% this year. The manufacturers expect it to reach 8% of marketing budgets by 2010. That puts the compound annual growth rate for their shopper-marketing spending at 21%, faster even than spending on Internet advertising (rising 15% annually) and far faster than the 2% growth projected for spending on such traditional media as TV, print and radio."

This is obviously great news for the industry. But once again, the problem of measuring the effectiveness of in-store marketing is a concern, as Ad Age writes "Shopper marketing also has been hampered by lack of audience-reach measurements comparable to other media, which in turn makes it hard for marketers or agencies to make spending decisions or do post-campaign effectiveness analysis on shopper marketing the same way as for traditional media."

Of course, this may change significantly due to today's announcent from Nielsen about establishing a global ratings metric for in-store marketing. But more on that later.

The fact that in-store marketing is growing so fast without conventional ways to measure effectiveness like television, print or even the internet says a lot about the potential of this industry. Advertisers are obviously acting on a certain amount of faith by starting to push more and more in-store marketing techniques. They obviously see a great future in it and want to be among those to stake the biggest claim on the market whether they have all of the numbers to back it up or not.

The statistics from the Deloitte study also further the idea that a serious splintering of media habits is occurring in America. There is a kind of free-fall nature to the way advertisers are reacting to this, which has turned out to be a good thing for us, as it means that newer techniques of reaching audiences are being given more attention (and more money).

It's impossible to say which media platform is going to be the "big winner" several years out, but playing in the advertising market is not a zero-sum game. While our piece of the pie might be growing at a fast rate, the whole pie itself is growing too. The money for at-retail projects is still probably coming out of some other budget (whether tv, print, or Internet), but with practically every budget growing, there are few losers, just smaller winners.

Tags: marketing at retail, out-of-home advertising