Mr Branding: 13% Quarterly Increase Reported for US Digital Ad Spend Driven by Social

Sunday, January 29, 2023

13% Quarterly Increase Reported for US Digital Ad Spend Driven by Social

The economic turmoil that has immersed the world has put a lot of industries in jeopardy, but in spite of the fact that this is the case digital marketing has managed to weather the storm for the most part. It turns out that digital ad spending in the US increased by as much as 13% in the fourth quarter of 2022, and a big chunk of that growth came from increased investment in social media.

This represents a $3 billion increase quarter over quarter, and it should be mentioned that ad impressions are also on the rise. They were sitting at around the 2.5 trillion mark in the third quarter of 2022, but by the fourth quarter of 2022 they had risen by 8.6% to reach 2.7 trillion with all things having been considered and taken into account.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 63% of this ad spending is going towards social media. 22% goes towards display and video, with the final 15% being taken up by OTT channels and platforms.

TikTok is having an especially good time of it based on the findings in this report. Ad spending on the platform grew by as much as 62%, which meant that it got the highest growth rate out of every single media channel that gets used by digital advertisers these days.

By comparison, ad spending on Facebook grew by 14% and TikTok’s main competitor Instagram only saw spending increase by approximately 15%. Snapchat did far better, although its 29% increase still fell way short of what TikTok saw, and it suggests that the growing short form video platform has a lot more to offer in the long run.

Twitter did not have a very good quarter, with ad spending on the platform only growing by 9%. Some might call Elon Musk’s leadership into question because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making it harder for him to keep the momentum going as CEO than might have been the case otherwise.

We also received some data pertaining to the top advertisers in the US, and it turns out that Amazon was far and away the highest spender by a very large margin. The ecommerce juggernaut spent close to half a billion dollars on advertising in the US in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone. This is despite Amazon slashing its digital ad spending by 6.3%, which just goes to show how big of a player Amazon is in this arena.

Following Amazon we saw P&G with a healthy $280 million, followed by Walmart with an even $200 million. The fact that Amazon is nearly the combined total of the next two advertisers on the list reveals the enormous level of influence the ecommerce giant has, and it also suggests that Amazon is quite critical to the advertising industry as a whole.

Amazon was the biggest advertisers on all major social media platforms save for Snapchat. Meta ended up being the advertiser that was putting the largest amount of spending into digital marketing on the Gen Z centered app.