Australian businesses plan to invest more than AUD$17.9 billion dollars on digital services in 2009, a survey by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA), IBM and Hyro has claimed. AIMIA’s first annual AIMIA Digital Services Index reported that revenue generated through digital services in Australian business jumped by 17% in 2008, and now accounts for nearly one in every four dollars earned.
Hyro Chief Marketing Officer Richard Lord claimed that the AIMIA Digital Services Index has challenged some of the traditional positioning of digital with corporate clients. “By relying on point statistics such as the level of online advertising as a measure of the impact of digital, we believe some ad agencies have misled their clients as to the true commercial significance of digital services. This research tells us resoundingly that digital is more than just online advertising – for every $1 of that gets spent on buying keywords or display advertising, there are $10 needed to deliver the initiatives which truly drive digital business.”
The Index forecast that organizations will next year target 40% of customers through digital initiatives. Significantly the research found that online advertising-including search, display and directory- regarded as the traditional core of Australia’s digital services industry, accounted for merely a third of spend on digital marketing. Additionally, companies were demonstrating innovation in their digital spend making greater use of specialist providers for digital services than in other areas of IT expenditure. Direct email is currently the largest single component of enterprise expenditure.
While the figures suggest that digital services are being adopted as legitimate and growing business tool, AIMIA chief executive John Butterworth said there is evidence of under investment. “While digital initiatives now sit behind 40% of customer interactions, and 25% of revenue, investment in digital services will reach only 14.3% of organizational expenditure for 2009, indicating significant under-investment in digital services”.
The report claims that digital services are also moving away from being just a B2C too but also increasingly integral to B2B transactions and in light of the pending fiscal freeze will prove to be a safer, more direct and accountable mode of engagement than traditional offline media choices.
Lord added that the investment statistics represented an unaddressed opportunity for specialist digital services companies to gain traction as marketers realise that digital initiatives are far more than an add-on function from an ad agency or other point solution provider.
“This research highlights just how significant digital initiatives are in business today and how much of corporate revenue and customer engagement is impacted by digital. Despite this, the research also shows that digital services are underinvested and that there is clearly a significant market opportunity in the digital services space for companies who can provide the scale and sophistication required,” Lord said.
Download the report here:
http://digitalservicesindex.com.au/?page_id=80
