While most of their money still goes to broadcast, a majority of local TV advertisers plan to shift some of their legacy media ad spending to digital, a Borrell Associates study released Thursday found.
The study, “What Local TV Advertisers Are Planning,” found one-fourth of the 1,589 TV ad buyers who participated plan to reduce, or eliminate altogether, the advertising they do with traditional media. Yellow pages, newspapers and magazine ads will be the first to go, it found.
More than one-fourth of respondents also said they plan to increase the money they spend on cinema and mobile advertising. Direct mail spending could be on the rise too, the study found.
That news comes at a time when local businesses’ digital ad spends already are closing in on their TV budgets. Local broadcast advertisers, the report found, spend an average of $84,168 on TV spots and $64,198 on digital ads.
Those figures are in keeping with another one of the report’s findings—that local businesses consider social media and their own websites as effective at driving business as local TV.
Local TV advertisers, however, also spend far more than businesses that don't leverage the airwaves. TV advertisers spend on average $325,719 annually on advertising—three times more than their non-TV advertising peers.
The $84,168 of that money budgeted for local TV is 54% higher than the average budget for cable—and more than double spent on any other medium, the study found.
In turn, TV advertisers are being wooed by other platforms. They get 1.6 times as many solicitations as non-TV advertisers do, Borrell said.
