The Ad Market in 2016: Print & TV on the Decline, Mobile Explodes

Advertising: it's everywhere. Turn on the radio, turn on the TV, flip open a newspaper or just hit the Web, and somewhere, someone is eager to sell something. Advertising runs many of our common institutions, from our favorite websites to our favorite TV shows. But the way advertising money is spent, according to a new report from eMarketer, is set to change, and in a pretty big way, in just the next few years.

The eMarketer report showed that, just this year alone, spending on mobile advertising in the U.K was expected to nearly double, with a 96 percent growth over last year to reach a total of 2.02 billion pounds sterling (about $3.46 billion U.S.). That's a pretty telling number in its own right, as the total advertising spend for print ads in newspapers in the U.K is at 2.06 billion pounds sterling (about $3.53 billion U.S.)

Driving this is some incredible growth in the mobile sector for Brits, as fully half the region is expected to own some breed of tablet—be it iPad, Kindle or the like—by 2018. That's going to help drive mobile advertising spending to a full 3.2 billion pounds sterling (about $5.49 billion U.S.) by 2015 alone. Meanwhile, spending on print advertising is expected to falter from 2.8 billion pounds sterling (about $4.8 billion U.S.) to 2.7 billion pounds sterling (about $4.63 billion U.S.) in the same time period.

What really shows the true growth of this field, however, is the change overall; just four years ago, the entire U.K mobile advertising market was worth just 83 million pounds sterling (about $1.42 billion U.S.), and that's well on track to grow in huge fashion but also destroy the numbers for television advertising just by 2016. Don't feel too badly for print, though, as the print numbers are said to not include money made from digital systems; since many newspapers and magazines are either including a digital equivalent or proceeding directly to same, the end result is clear.

It's a development that will almost certainly surprise for its sheer rapidity, though not necessarily for its overall arrival into the field. Advertisers inevitably go where the people are, and as people depart print and television for online sources and mobile sources, it's not surprising to see the advertisers follow along. Though it may come as a surprise to see just how quickly this move is shaping up; however, some might say this was a long time coming, being as there was a fairly steady move away from print and television to online sources, but mobile is gaining much more rapidly than online did. Here, some might say that online moves helped to found the rapid adoption of mobile by removing much of the skepticism faced by online advertising, though that's something of a matter for conjecture.

Still, what's clear is that online advertising, particularly mobile, is about to spike in the U.K. That's going to pose some rather big changes for print and television over there, and if it spreads to other countries, the trend may well fundamentally alter the way we look at media and advertising.