New Zealand online advertising spend has continued to grow despite the recession dramatically reducing ad spend by many businesses. Online advertising accounted for just over 10% of the total advertising spend in 2009, according to IAB NZ figures.

In short, online has been eating traditional advertising’s lunch.

And based on what’s happening in more developed markets, it will soon be eating traditional advertising’s breakfast and dinner too!

Skeptical? Check out this report in MediaWeek UK which states that this year US online advertising spend is set to overtake all print and DM combined.

New York – Spending on digital advertising in the US will overtake print for the first time this year, according to new figures.

The report from marketing analyst Outsell forecasts that marketers will spend $119.6bn on digital strategies and $111.5bn on print, including ads in newspapers and magazines and all direct mail.

Overall, US ad spend is expected to return to growth and increase 1.2% to $368bn.

Despite the growth of online, magazine advertising is expected to increase by 1.9% to $9.4bn after falling 26% last year.

Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell, said: “Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding.

“As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they’re spreading their spending over a widening set of options.”

The Outsell report surveyed more than 1,000 US marketers online in December.

Last September, a report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) suggested that online had usurped TV to become the biggest advertising medium in the UK after rising 4.6% in the first half of 2009.

According to the biannual IAB report, internet UK ad spend generated £1.75bn pounds and accounted for 23.5% of all spend. This compared with 18.7% in the first half of 2008. Elsewhere, Television accounted for 21.9%, press display for 18.5% and direct mail for 11.5%.

For over 20 years the New Zealand Marketing Association has run the RSVP and Nexus Awards to recognise excellence in response driven marketing campaigns.  Notably this is the first year a search marketing award has been included and acknowledges the growing importance search marketing plays for NZ businesses.

The awards for 2009 were announced at a lavish event last Friday. I’m delighted to say that SureFire won the ‘Best Use of Search Engine Marketing Award’ for SEO (search engine optimisation) work with TVNZ, New Zealand’s leading television broadcaster.

Kudos to all of the talented SureFire team for this great achievement, in particular Nick Guebhard. And of course thanks to TVNZ for their on-going committment to SEO.

Tom Cotter, General Manager of Content and Delivery for TVNZ, says the company was impressed with the campaign’s execution and results.

“The TVNZ website has experienced significant increases in traffic since the re-launch. A key element of this growth has been driven by organic search traffic, which is now one of our largest sources of visitors.”

SEO Campaign Summary

• In order to improve organic search rankings, particularly for news, sports and the online video, TVNZ engaged SureFire Search to ensure that SEO was an integral aspect of website design and build, rather than a retro-fitted afterthought when it launched an upgraded version of its news, sports & entertainment website, http://tvnz.co.nz.

• Since starting this SEO project, TVNZ has seen increases in top 10 rankings in Google for core keywords, as well as achieving top rankings for multiple long-tail keywords. This has resulted in a significant increase in organic traffic from search engines and driven a dramatic increase in overall website traffic.

• As a website publisher, TVNZ generates revenues from advertisements carried on the website and these revenues are directly related to visitor numbers and page views. The more visitors and the more pages they view, the greater ad revenue generated. Since the site re-launch website organic traffic from search engines has delivered millions of extra visits.

The New Zealand IAB has today released final figures for 2009 &, as expected, the amount of money being invested in online advertising by NZ businesses has continued to grow.

Total NZ online spend for 2009 was NZ$213.89m, which represented a 10.06% growth over 2008 (NZ$193.15m). Not a bad result, given most businesses slashed their advertising budgets due to the recession. Clearly the increase in online advertising has been at the expense of offline as marketers have to do more with less.

No big surprises in that Search and Directories led the way with year on year growth of 31.64% in 2009. This represents 37% of all interactive spend in 2009, up from 31% in 2008, and edges New Zealand a little closer to the Australian figure of 50.9% being spent on paid search advertising.

Display advertising grew 7.67% to $64.30m from $58.12m and accounted for 30% of all interactive spend in 2009. Classifieds decreased from $75.32m to $71.43m, reflecting the decrease in job advertisements.

2009 Total Ad Spend by Channel vs. 2008

In previous posts about NZ online advertising I’ve lamented the fact we’re so far behind the 8 ball compared to Australia & UK where roughly 25% of total advertising spend is spent online.

And most of that on search marketing!

Despite this, the good news is that in New Zealand the share of advertising spend invested in online advertising has  gradually been increasing.

Last year the IAB predicted that online advertising would finally climb into double digits and account for a 10% share on NZ total advertising spend  by the end of 2009.

The New Zealand IAB will shortly be releasing final figures for 2009 and the big question is, are they right?

Will online account for 10% of total NZ adspend?

Interest is high & the IAB are running a poll on their website asking people how confident they are that online advertising will take a 10% share on ad spend in NZ.

As you can see at this point (26 Jan) it looks like the overwhelming view is that it will.

Being an anonymous poll I’m of course not going to reveal how I voted.

What do you think – yes or no? Comment below and vote in the poll which is here: IAB poll