HotTopics: Annual Ad Spending Study 2006: Business, Healthcare, and Consumer Advertisers

This HotTopics, the second report in Outsell's annual Ad Spending Study Series, is the first in the industry to reveal detailed trends about advertisers serving businesses, healthcare institutions and practitioners, and consumers. It compares key findings across advertisers targeting these three markets and reveals 'where, why, and how fast' business, healthcare, and consumer advertisers are moving online, as well as the impacts of these shifts on print ads, events, and TV/Radio. It explores previously uncharted areas such as advertisers' adoption rates for online advertising; budget allocation, growth rates, and trade-offs across all types of advertising; the effectiveness of Google vs. Yahoo! and Microsoft; the performance of keyword ads vs. contextual and behavioral ads; and the factors driving advertising spending decisions. Among the key findings: growth in online ad spending will be higher than all other ad spending at 18.8 percent in 2006, but advertisers continue to find print ads and events effective and valuable; Google is rated more effective than both Yahoo! and MSN across all three markets; search engine spending is the fastest growing of all major marketing methods at an expected 26.3 percent for 2006; and the healthcare sector is facing the largest upheaval, with the lowest share of online spending but the fastest-growing rate for the total of online, search engines, Webinars, sponsored online content, and e-mail marketing. Publishers and information providers that need to understand business, healthcare, and consumer ad markets and where ad funding is going will find this essential reading.