Amazon closing in on Google, Facebook digital ad market duopoly, Phill... https://www.inquirer.com/business/harmelin-media-google-facebook-am...

Amazon closing in on Google, Facebook

digital ad market duopoly, Philly’s
Harmelin agency says

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Advertisers and companies trying to expand their

marketing, take heed: There’s a new way to reach
customers, starting with something called
“advanced television.”

That’s when advertising on television is

customized, much like online ads, using
consumers’ viewing habits, purchases, and
location data.

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Advanced advertising on TV was one of the

insights that the Philadelphia ad agency
Harmelin Media shared with clients at a
Wednesday event.

“Consumer data is now being matched with

viewership data to follow your audience wherever
they live,” Harmelin Media’s Dan Cox, vice
president and head of planning, told the crowd of
about 100 guests at the Barnes Foundation’s
auditorium.

For example, cable and satellite providers such as

Comcast and DISH network now show highly
customized TV ads to one household that owns a
cat, while a different ad broadcasts at the same
time to a household next door owning a dog,
based on credit card data, GPS phone location
data, and other tracking data, he said.

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Currently, advanced TV advertising is only 3

percent of the United States’ $70 billion in total
ad spending per year, but it’s expected to grow
exponentially.

Audio marketing is also changing, with terrestrial

radio still accounting for four hours per day of
consumers’ time, said Brooke Reynolds,
Harmelin media manager. While AM/FM radio
accounts for 50 percent of listeners’ time, online
music services such as Pandora and Spotify have
grown to 16 percent of the audio market, she said.
Spotify is more popular with the 18-to-34-year-
old demographic, while Pandora and its
subsidiary SoundCloud are more popular with
older listeners.

Podcasts represent only 4 percent of the audio

advertising market, and “it’s been hard for
advertisers to break in until recently,” she added.
“That said, podcast listeners tend to be
consumers with incomes over $100,000
annually.”

Mobile phones, meanwhile, have since replaced

TV as the most valuable source of consumer data,
said Garry Herbert, associate media director at
Harmelin.

“We’re now incapable of giving up our phones,

because of the dopamine rush” every time we
access them, he said.

For advertisers, this is a bonanza.

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“Our phones reveal where we go, what we do,

what we buy, how frequently we visit a retailer,
and how long we spend buying,” he said.

As a result, even digital billboards are growing, as

ad agencies can pinpoint the phone locations of
commuters. Advertising dollars spent on digital
billboards reached $8 billion in 2018, up 5
percent from the prior year, said Alison
Bolognese, media director at Harmelin.

“Cell phone companies collect this data and sell it

so we can plan and measure” who sees company
ads, she added. “For example, we can identify
people who’ve been to a Wawa in the past three
months.”

Among phone apps, five of the top 10

applications are social-media apps, including
YouTube, Facebook, and SnapChat.

The over-34-year-olds primarily use Facebook,

while 18-to-34-year-olds use Facebook,
Instagram, and SnapChat, said Glenn Bernard,
associate media director.

YouTube and Facebook now have about the same

reach to consumers as TV, he said.

In the Internet search space, Google is far and

away the leader, with 81 percent of search used
on all devices. Bing and Yahoo are only in the
single-digit percentages.

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However, Google is followed closely by Amazon,

which many consumers use as a retail search
engine for price comparisons, he said.

Finally, voice search is predicted to be a high-

growth advertising channel, with 118.5 million
active smart speakers now owned by Americans,
up from 66.7 million in 2017. Over half of U.S.
household smart-speaker owners bought more
than one. Amazon owns 65 percent of the smart-
speaker market share.

In digital advertising revenue overall, Amazon

“still trails Facebook and Google’s duopoly,”
Bernard said, with the latter two giants holding
57.7 percent of the market in 2018. However,
Amazon’s “wealth of consumer data will allow it
to contend with the duopoly, turning it into a
triopoly.”

Top advertisers with Amazon include Comcast,

Progressive, AT&T, Purina PetCare, Geico, and
American Express.

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