Media

Digital Ads forecast to surpass TV by 2017

Memo to Madison Avenue: The digital shift is on the horizon.

Digital outlets will overtake television — which has long drawn more ad dollars than any other kind of media — to dominate the US market by 2017, a new forecast shows.

Spending on the digital sector will hit $72 billion, taking its market share of all media to 38 percent and outstripping the $70.5 billion projected for television, according to a new report from Magna Global.

Forecasters have been trying to pin down when the Internet will surpass TV. Research firm eMarketer expects it won’t happen until 2018.

Magna also calls for ad revenues posted by US media owners — or “core media” — to reach a new high of $172 billion in 2015. Core media’s jump from an estimated $167 billion for this year suggests ad spending will finally surpass its current record of $169 billion, which was achieved in 2007.

It also suggests Madison Avenue will have taken six years to recover from the 20 percent ad-revenue hit experienced at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.

Before returning to such exalted heights, however, core media must first overcome some unexpected second-quarter softness.

This softness, following a strong first quarter, was severe enough for Magna to cut the 6 percent core-media growth previously forecast for all of 2014 to 5.1 percent.

The media forecaster blamed the forecast reduction on unexpected slowdowns in most traditional media categories. Hurt most, it says, were local TV stations and non-Hispanic TV networks.

Some ad spending slated for the second quarter may have been prematurely spent, to take advantage of the Winter Olympics in the first quarter, Magna said.

More worrisome to TV’s traditional players is the accelerating trend among advertisers to divert dollars previously earmarked for TV to digital media and, in particular, to online video.