I have read some interesting information and quotes from the Forrester Research US Marketing Forecast 2009 – 2014 which has some great and very worthwhile digital industry related quotes in their forecast.

“Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for Yahoo!”

This is a trend we are seeing already but some companies are scared or not able to leave the traditional forms of marketing which they have become accustomed to and are comfortable with. Some companies still don’t understand that digital and online marketing is easily quantifiable and can be changed, updated, optimised & tracked so that you can generate huge and attainable ROI’s.

This goes to show that companies who don’t implement a full service digital and online plan within their marketing strategies will end up being overshadowed by their competitors who do, and more importantly are likely to miss out on a major percentage of possible sales as the amount of money spent online grows.

Traditional Advertising such as TV will, and indeed already is, take a huge hit as the smart companies who see the benefits of spending small amounts online to create a huge return start to allocate more of their advertising budgets away from expensive and immeasurable forms of advertising. TV viewing figures are still strong although with the influx of recordable TV technology options where ads can be skipped or forwarded through with ease and the digital switchover increasing the amount of channels which people now watch, splitting viewing figures, it begs the question,

‘Will traditional advertising just become a waste of cash?’

Media research firm Ebiquity forecasts UK TV ad spend will be down 10% year on year in 2009, and will total less than £3bn for the first time since 1998; While 60% of all marketers surveyed in the MarketingProfs study (where they interviewed 600 marketing managers about their plans for the future) said that they would be increasing online budgets.