Advertising pays: the AA has the stats prove it!

“You never believe the ads? Then we stand no chance with a headline like ‘Advertising adds £100 billion to the economy’.” If you haven’t seen it yet, you will soon.

This strapline for the Advertising Association’s new ad campaign created by TBWA will be popping up all over the place over the coming weeks. It draws on solid stats to remind policymakers and the great British public what a crucial role advertising plays in our everyday lives. This is the AA’s first ever ad campaign and cherry picks key stats from the AA/Deloitte report Advertising Pays to use in posters, postcards and online.

I particularly like the way it invites us to imagine a world without ads – much as we might enjoy watching our favourite TV programme with no ad breaks, it wouldn’t have been made in the first place without advertising. Though I’m not so sure about their choice of TV programme for the campaign – how many of us would miss Downton Abbey if it disappeared from our TVs?

But the campaign hits the spot when it tells us that without advertising “36% of current broadband households would not yet have broadband access”. Now that’s something we would miss!Some of the other stats the AA uses are, if anything, rather conservative. The “550,000 UK jobs rely on the advertising industry” one doesn’t include digital marketing, a huge growth area in the UK economy, so the real number is probably much higher. The value of direct marketing to the UK economy research the DMA conducted in 2012 found that the direct marketing industry employed 530,000 people.

While advertising and direct marketing have traditionally been very different the lines are blurring as advertising moves into the direct, data-driven arena through technological advances such as catch-up TV. The arrival of personalised advertising platforms (Tesco’s Clubcard TV and Sky AdSmart) could change the TV ad model and allow advertisers to have direct, one-to-one relationships with viewers.

This makes the campaign particularly timely for any business that uses direct, data driven marketing as the threat of over-zealous regulation by EU lawmakers looms. I’m thinking of the clauses in the draft EU Data Protection Regulation that will make it almost impossible for advertisers and marketers to operate.

How do you think advertising fuels the UK economy? Join in the conversation at #adpays

By Smarayda Christoforou, Copywriter, DMA