Business believed in promotion – Kommersant

The share of advertisers planning to increase their budget in 2023 increased in the first quarter year-on-year from 40% to 53%, NMi Group and RACA calculated. Brands are also looking for new promotion formats, for example, they are starting to order advertising through voice assistants. Analysts and experts say that companies are moving away from the resource-saving strategy that was basic for last year and are trying to take as much market share as possible after the departure of foreign competitors.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with a joint study of the advertising holding NMi Group and AKAR, from which it follows that advertisers plan to increase budgets for promotion in 2023: the share of those who are ready to increase costs in the first quarter was 53% against 40% in January-March 2022. The survey was conducted among 100 advertisers across the country.

Of these, 85% already implemented advertising campaigns in the first quarter and 74% plan to maintain marketing activity until the end of the year.

In addition, the share of companies that completely cut advertising in the second half of 2022 decreased from 17% to 14% by the first quarter of 2023. Until the end of 2023, only 15% of advertisers do not plan to run campaigns, which is 7 percentage points lower than the results of the first wave, analysts say. Another 3% of respondents talk about the entry of business into the international market and advertising abroad.

Advertisers have been cutting budgets since the start of the pandemic (see “Kommersant” dated March 18, 2020). The market began to recover in 2021, however, after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the usual foreign advertising platforms left Russia – YouTube, Google Ads, Instagram, Facebook (owned by Meta, whose Instagram and Facebook activities in the Russian Federation are recognized as extremist and banned). Attracting customers via the Internet has become more difficult and expensive: in the third quarter of 2022, every fifth Russian company reduced the cost of online advertising (see “Kommersant” dated November 16, 2022). At the same time, almost all major foreign advertisers left the country.

According to NMi Group and RACA, in the first quarter, digital promotion remains the most popular tool: digital media (digital information dissemination format) is used by 76%, and digital non-media (non-media digital agencies) – 54%.

39% of respondents ordered advertising from bloggers, and another 12% used voice assistants such as Salyut (Sberbank), Marusya (VK), Alisa (Yandex), Oleg (Tinkoff). ), Google Assistant, and Siri. In last year’s survey, voice assistants were not considered separately. NMi added that assistants “select relevant applications based on the advertiser’s target (targeted marketing mechanism) when making a purchase.”

VK clarified that in the first quarter of 2023, investments in targeted advertising in stories and clips tripled, and influencers’ interest in native integrations increased many times over, “the demand for native projects in Marus is growing from companies in the pharmaceutical industry, tourism, children’s goods, finance and other industries. The holding says that one of the business needs in working with voice assistants is “the ability to create a basket of goods and simplify the path to purchase using your voice, we are already actively testing such mechanics with our partners.”

At the same time, for example, Tinkoff emphasized that they do not launch direct advertising campaigns through the Oleg assistant – “this is a product that, on the contrary, protects users from unwanted advertising and helps in financial matters.” Yandex declined to comment. Sberbank did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

The departure of major Western advertisers motivated companies to redistribute budgets.

“If in 2022 Russian companies spent their efforts and resources on debugging production and maintaining their core business, then in 2023 they will try to take as much market share as possible, win consumer loyalty, which will provoke an increase in marketing budgets and activity in all media,” explains NMi Group business development director Timofey Los. The market continues to stabilize, agrees the Executive Director of SA Media Nikita Pribylovsky, and every month, according to him, more and more advertisers who have chosen the path of waiting or even optimizing costs in 2022 are returning to a growth strategy and increasing investment in advertising for this.

Julia Yurasova