Picturing the Belgian online ad market

I found 2 intruiging pictures on Digg yesterday, which made me think of the following. At the left, you see a picture of Piccadilly Circus in 1949. This is how the Belgian online advertising market today looks like.

Basically, the scene displays an organized mess, with the kind of advertisers that are present limited to the more edgy advertisers of cigarettes and alcohol and the ones that are obviously relevant, like entertainment companies. Think of it as the obvious e-commerce sites (auctions, loans, dating, ringtones) and the more edgy online betting sites that dominate the online ad market in Belgium today (in terms of ad spend). It is great to have them, but it feels that it could be more.

It certainly looks like this place could be used to attract bigger advertisers to correspond with the massive traffic. If you search in Dutch for ‘car’, only 2 of the 8 advertisers are car brands. Search for ‘fridge’, and no appliance maker or real-world distributor is yet to be seen in the ads. (Searches done on Google and MSN)

To sum it up, the Piccadilly Circus in 1949 is clearly vibrant and full of opportunity, and so is the Belgian online ad market today. In Belgium, according to EIAA and IAB, 19% of the media consumption time of consumers is allocated to the internet, while in 2005 only a poor 2.2% of media ad spent was directed to this medium. What is clearly needed here is some men and women with a convincing story to tell out loud to advertisers, a story that shows a nicer picture, like the following.

On the right, you see the future of the Belgian advertising market. In the most crowded area, you find big brand names paying top-dollar (the video screens on top, not fully visible here, acting like a Youtube with commercials or MTV clips with Google ads). That is nice of course, but the real, BIG difference, is that the billboards will be advertising the exact product that you were just thinking of! If sounds spooky, I'm just referring to contextual advertising, whether it's while searching, checking your email our reading your favorite blog.


And even then, the real action is not at Piccadilly Circus, or on the home pages of Belgium’s most visited sites. It is further down the road, towards the actual destinations of each of Piccadilly's passengers, that you find just as much commercial value, or even more (search for ‘fridge Siemens’ and at least one online distributor of actual fridges now shows up, today). Indeed, it’s toward the destination that you find the more targeted advertisers in the right contextual setting (see 3rd picture left). Thanks to a streamlined traffic (compare the traffic on pic 1 and 2), the total advertising market will then be optimized, including the millions of small yet very specific advertisers and sites.

Of course, we are not there yet. But with the good intentions and energy of a lot of people that I know from the Belgian online advertising world, this is most likely to change very soon.

In such a scenario, the Belgian 19%-2.2% media time / ad spent imbalance seems like a distant memory.