According to recent data from STRATA, a media-buying and -selling software provider, more than half of advertisers surveyed said that location-based advertising will not be in their plans in 2011.
For the first time, the STRATA poll found that more agencies say they see no obstacle in the way of boosting digital spending. Previous surveys found that the majority of advertisers cited the lack of advertiser demand as the largest obstacle.
In the third-quarter report, 81.3 percent of advertisers say they are focusing more on digital than they did last year, up 17 percent from the first quarter.
When it comes to digital ad spending, 81.5 percent of advertisers say online display is their No. 1 choice, followed by search with 67.7 percent.
Despite the hype surrounding location-based advertising, 57.4 percent of respondents said that the medium will not be in their plans for 2011. Facebook Places (24 percent) and Foursquare (22 percent) were the most popular outlets in the location-based advertising arena.
Mobile advertising, another channel garnering much discussion, is seeing a lukewarm response, with 97 percent of advertisers saying their clients are not requesting platforms like iAd.
Ad networks are most likely to be used by agencies for digital ad buying, with 81 percent saying they go to the likes of YellowBook, Google and Yahoo.
For online ad spend, search engines are the medium of choice with 79.4 percent of the response, followed by social media sites with 65.1 percent and news sites with 36.5 percent. Facebook, as expected, led the social media realm with 87.9 percent of that response.
The STRATA survey also found that while the iPhone remains the top choice for mobile advertisers (82.7 percent), Android is quickly gaining ground (up 9 percent from the previous quarter to get 50 percent of the response as the top choice for mobile advertising).
Display advertising (48 percent) was the most popular form of mobile advertising, followed by SMS advertising (23.3 percent).
The survey found that 33 percent of advertisers don’t expect the economy and their businesses to return to a strong period of growth until the middle of 2011 at the earliest, and 47 percent are seeing clients maintain flat budgets.
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