According to Next&Co’s Digital Media Wastage report, advertisers wasted $5.46 billion of their digital ad spend budgets. That represents 41% of the overall digital ad spend of $13.9 billion for digital ad campaigns.
The findings represent a significant jump on the reported $3 billion wasted in 2021.
Next & Co, a digital and traditional performance marketing agency, audited 198 companies across the real estate, finance, pharmaceutical, insurance, retail, and FMCG sectors with digital ad budgets between $500,000 to $27 million, including ASX-listed (15%), multinational (39%), national (27%), and SME (19%) companies.
The data, compiled from Next&Co’s Prometheus proprietary media auditing tool, found that retail brands led the pack in wasting the most digital ad dollars in 2022 at $80.4 million, followed by finance at $72.6 million, and FMCGs at $21.4 million.
According to the report digital media channels last year, most digital ad spend was wasted on Facebook at $119 million and Google at $109 million.
“With advertising costs increasing year-on-year, brands are struggling to keep up with the innovations most advertising platforms offer,” said John Vlasakakis, Next&Co co-founder.
“It shows many businesses’ internal resources are not across best practice or are running advertising that isn’t profitable or sustainable.
“For example, brands are still struggling to adapt to the impact that the IOS 14.5 operating system and later releases have on Facebook’s advertising platform.”
He said that “the data is shocking,” adding that it “shows that brands really need to deep-dive into their spending and 2023 campaign planning, and ensure their digital ads are really delivering results.”
Feature image: Damir Mijailovic
