Google and Facebook take 53% of online display ad spend

According to marketing consultants OC&C, Google and Facebook are on course to take home 53% of online display advertising spend in the UK this year.

And predictions state that this will increase to almost two-thirds of the market share by 2020.

Display is stated to account for around 33% of the £4.7bn being spent on digital advertising in the UK. However, expenditure continues to be channelled away from traditional sources to the globe’s two biggest tech players.

According to OC&C’s report, “The two technology giants will play a critical role in the dissemination of these adverts in future, controlling how and when ads are served, and to whom.”

OC&C partner Fergus Jarvis adds that, “Google and Facebook provide unique tools which allow marketers to reach and target customers in new and innovative ways. As these tools become more precise, and their audience continues to grow, CMOs are increasingly seeing the benefit of highly measurable and targeted campaigns.

“As a result, Facebook and Google’s command of the online advertising market is not a matter of if, but when."

Originally reported by Press Gazette, OC&C’s data also adds that next year is likely to see spend on mobile phone media consumption exceed TV for the first time, with an average of 3.2 hours per day compared with 3.1 for TV.

“Facebook and Google are increasingly at the centre of all content consumed on a mobile and can provide quite remarkable reach to advertisers as a result,” Jarvis adds.

“With Facebook and Google not only able to drive traffic, but also able to identify that traffic and monetise it, publishers need to find ways of collaborating and innovating to keep up. In order to compete, media companies need to build out a better view of their customers and aim to provide better targeting to marketers directly than they can get through Facebook or Google.”

As ad spend continues to shift to digital channels, however, the risk of ad fraud becomes more prominent.

Reports state that up to 30% of the online advertising market was vulnerable to ad fraud in 2015. Furthermore, a report from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) even predicts that, “ad fraud will in future be second only to cocaine and opiate markets as a form of organised crime.”