Forrester Revises Interactive Outlook, Will Account For 21% Of Marketing By 2014

Interactive marketing expenditures will reach $55 billion by 2015, accounting for 21% of all marketing spending, according to a new forecast released this morning by Forrester Research.

The absolute dollar expenditures are essentially the same as one the research firm released in April, but it has revised interactive marketing's share of total advertising spending, reflecting the downward shift in expenditures for other media since then. Based on Forrester's new outlook, interactive's share of total marketing budgets will rise nine percentage points from its estimate of 12% this year.

"To me, the most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline," Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk posted on the company's blog. "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."

The greatest growth is projected to come from social media, which is forecast to rise to $3.113 billion in 2014 from $716 million this year.

The next biggest growth sector will be mobile marketing, which is expected to rise to $1.274 billion in 2014 from $391 million this year.

While search, display and email marketing will continue to grow at double-digit rates over the next five years, their rate of growth is slowing, and will account for a smaller percentage of the interactive marketing stimulus, according to Forrester's estimates.