Senior Advertising Execs Expect Dramatic Growth in Budgets

New research from Alfi, an AI enterprise SaaS advertising platform, shows senior advertising executives are forecasting strong growth in advertising budgets over the next 12 months with 24% predicting dramatic growth.

The global study among senior executives including CEOs found 61% are more modest and are predicting slight growth while just 15% believe advertising budgets will remain at around the same level as today.

Growing budgets for advertising mean the executives questioned in the UK, US, France, Germany, Canada, Australia are increasingly looking for better ways to measure the reach and effectiveness of campaigns.

Alfi’s study shows executives are generally happy with the campaign data available but just 21% rate it as ‘excellent’ while 65% describe it as ‘good’. However, 14% say it is average or poor.

That is driving increased interest in the use of QR codes in Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising, which enables advertisers to measure exactly how impactful their campaigns are through first-party data which is accessible instantly.

More than a third (34%) of senior executives believe the importance of QR codes in advertising will increase dramatically over the next two years while 56% believe it will increase slightly.

“The global advertising industry is going from strength to strength after recovering strongly in 2021 to hit a new record high** and the indications are that it will continue in 2022 and beyond,” said Peter Bordes, Interim CEO, Alfi. “Increased spending should mean increasing the focus on measurement and data, which explains the growing use of technology and QR codes in particular.”

The study found all the senior executives questioned agree that the use of QR codes in advertising will increase dramatically over the next two years with 50% strongly agreeing with the view.

Bordes concluded: “Throughout the industry we can expect a higher focus on data-driven insights by expanding advertising capabilities, analytical sophistication and delivering it all seamlessly over multiple devices – thus leading to not only confident purchase behaviours but greater one-to-one connections with consumers.”