SMG Media Futures reveals marketers and media investment focus

Customer Experience (CX) has emerged as the biggest opportunity identified by Australian businesses (51%), ahead of content marketing (42%), big data (38%) and social media (33%), according to the 2016 SMG Media Futures Report.

Remarkably though, only 6% of respondents believed they were implementing CX strategies successfully.

“Marketers are looking to agency partners to provide solutions, with 61% looking for data capabilities and 52% for technology capabilities from their partners.

“Not surprisingly, both marketers and media have signalled they are committed to investing in infrastructure, particularly people and skills (78%) this year and into 2017,” said SMG CEO Chris Nolan.

Marketers said they will focus most on investing in owned assets such as websites (67%) and data management platforms (61%), while media said they would invest in personalisation, mobile and data.

Marketers also identified the biggest growth in spend on channels most identified with CX: social media (up 11.6%), online video (up 11.6%) and mobile (up 8%).

“2018 will be an inflexion point where industry growth will be driven by mass addressable media,” said Nolan.

At the other end of the scale, respondents said spend on magazines would be down 7.1% and newspapers would be down 4.4%. This compares with total spend for 2016 predicted to rise by 2.8%.

Outdoor and digital will invest a combined $100m in transforming its mass offerings into digitally enabled experience channels.

“Digital powered TV and outdoor will allow marketers scalable control of their customer experience and we believe we will see a resurgence of investment—up to double digit growth—in these platforms,” said Nolan.

Source: Starcom Mediavest Group