Large Marketers Impact Local Ad Economy With Big Purchases

BY Kathy Crosett
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Large advertisers are out there, waiting to spend money with the media companies that will help them connect to their target audiences. How can you sell them more local market media space and digital services this year? Start by understanding their planned spending and their level of expertise.

Spending Levels

Earlier this year, Borrell Associates surveyed about 3,800 local advertisers across the U.S. About 10% of these businesses qualified as large local-​market advertisers, meaning they spend over $200,000 a year on marketing. In fact, the average media ad budget for this group is $350,000. For the most part, 68.8%, these are independent businesses. But, nearly 14% are franchised, while the rest are part of a bigger company.

Master Marketers

These business owners understand the power of marketing. Over 50% call themselves master marketers, meaning they have accrued over 10,000 hours perfecting the craft in their career. You can count on them to be knowledgeable about the most recent trends. They get why formats like in-​game ads and podcast ads work. Master marketers will typically spread their ad money across six types of media when they launch a campaign. By comparison, the novice marketers often use five types of media.

Media Mix

Which digital media formats get the biggest portion of their attention and their money? Search. With an average search budget of over $78,000, the large advertisers in the local market will generally increase spending in 2019. To fund the increase, we can expect them to shave their allocations to traditional media. They’ll also be exploring newer formats like sponsored content and native ads 6% and audio ads such as podcasts at 8 percent. 

Here’s how traditional media budgets break out for the largest advertisers:

  • Broadcast TV $238,471
  • Direct mail $111,322
  • Newspaper $102,822
  • Radio $101,797
  • Cable $99,938
  • Event $89,156

To learn more about how audiences respond to specific types of advertising in the local market, check out the AudienceSCAN profiles available on AdMall from SalesFuel.

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