Marketing salaries, lost publisher revenues, global ad spend: 5 killer stats to start your week

FMCG identified as the highest paid sector in marketing

FMCG is the highest paid of 24 sectors in marketing, with FMCG marketers averaging a £63,916 annual pay packet, according to Marketing Week’s annual Career and Salary Survey.

Salaries for ‘gaming and gambling’ and ‘health and pharmaceuticals’ were ranked second and third respectively. Meanwhile, education was identified as the worst paid industry, with marketing employees accruing £44,424 on average – 30.5% less than their FMCG counterparts.

It is not all good news for FMCG, however, as further insight shows there is a 29% gender pay gap in this sector. However, this is not the worst performing sector, with ‘charity/not-for-profit’ claimed that title with a 47% gap.

Source: Marketing Week

UK publishers losing £167m in revenue due to crude advertiser blacklists

UK new publishers are estimated to be losing £167m in revenues every year because of crude brand safety keyword blacklists. That is equal to 22% of the £758m invested in online UK news brands last year.

Four-fifths of ads served on premium publishers are subject to keyword blacklists, which are designed to stop ads appearing next to news content that might be toxic or unfavourable for a brand.

However, the study shows 40% of premium media inventory is neutral or uncontroversial, but 57% of this is incorrectly blocked due to blacklists failing to understand the context around words such as ‘shoot’, ‘injury’ or ‘kill’.

The issue is a particular problem for LGBTQ+ publishers, with 73% of inventory being blocked being of blacklisted keywords including ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘same sex’.

Source: Cheq

Amazon becomes first brand to pass $200bn valuation

Amazon has become the first brand to be worth more than $200bn.

Amazon’s brand value increased by 18% last year to $220.8bn, $60bn more than second placed Google and $80bn more than Apple, which is in third place. Tech companies made up the entire top five, with Microsoft’s brand value coming in at $117.bn and Samsung’s at $94.5bn.

The combined value of the top 500 brands was up by less than 2% in 2019. with 244 increasing their value and another 212 experiencing a decrease – 95 of those by 10% or more.

Source: Brand Finance

Global ad market to grow by 3.9% this year

The global ad market is predicted to grow by 3.9% in 2020 to be worth $615.4bn. That is an acceleration on the 2.6% growth experienced in 2019.

Digital is expected to power that growth, with spend forecast to rise by 10.5% year on year to $276bn, equal to 45.7% of global spend. Digital will also help TV return to grow, with spend expected to be up 0.6%, and radio up 1.7%.

UK growth is forecast to outpace global rates, increasing 6% year on year in 2020. India is expected to experience the fastest growth, at 10.9%.

Source: Dentsu Aegis Network

Email the most popular direct marketing channel

Email is the most popular direct marketing channel, with 46% preferring email – almost twice as much as any other channel. Post came second on 26%, with 24% for text or face-to-face.

Consumers estimate that in 2019 they received an average of 55 emails per week, down from 73 in 2017. Some 56% say half of these emails are marketing messages from brands.

Despite this, just 13% of people said that more than half the emails they receive are useful to them, while 57% cite receiving too many emails as the main reason they unsubscribe.

In terms of what consumers want from emails, 65% say discounts or offers, 59% email receipts and 43% advance notice of products/services or sales.

Source: Data and Marketing Association