The Digital Share. It’s all about the Cash.

eMarketer just released another sharp snapshot illustrating the rapid growth of digital ad spending. Among the many points demanding your attention is that 2016 will be the year digital placements will outpace TV commercials. While spending isn’t necessarily an indication of the importance of particular format, reading the numbers this way does give us a good idea of how technologies are shaping how budgets are formed and dollars are being spent. For example, Email spending is still a rounding error at .4% yet this remains one of the most important formats for maintaining relationships with our audiences. On the other hand (and I’ve been saying this for some time) spending on display ads has started to outshine search and that is an indication that advertisers are placing greater emphasis this format’s effectiveness. The explosive growth of programmatic buying technologies and enhanced data integration are playing a big role in this surge. While programmatic does have it’s foibles, it’s only going to get better over time. Indeed many of the buying disciplines that apply to search are now being applied to programmatic and plenty of companies are discovering that skill sets for these two disciplines dovetail exceedingly well.

Get yourself a copy of the report, watch the super fun video of my talk on programmatic from the recent iMedia Brand Summit and drop me a line if you want to chat about any of this media goodness.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.com