I’m pleased to announce that Forrester’s five year forecast is now complete and live on Forrester’s site. It feels like this has been a long time in coming from my side too! Please see the full report for detailed explanations of the trends affecting overall marketing budgets and the growth of the channel in the forecast.

You may remember we previewed our forecast at Forrester’s Marketing Forum at the end of April. If you cross reference this post to the one we posted as follow up to the forum, you will notice that the "% of all advertising spend" has changed. The absolute forecast is still the same, we just changed this calculation to make sure it was done in the same way as in years past. See below for the most recent release:

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This research will certainly help marketers plan their channel strategies.

  • Search continues to lead interactive spend followed by display.
  • And owned social media assets (like internal blogs, community sites) are really the only emerging media getting traction in today’s economic climate.

But to me, the most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline. Yep. With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals. But reasonable marketers won’t relinquish budget because their programs are running too efficiently. Instead, marketers will allocate unused advertising dollars into investments like innovation, research, customer service, customer experiences, and marketing-specific technology and IT staff, in order to further marketing’s strategic influence within their companies.