As buyers shifted online, so did cos: D2C firms top advertisers on FB

“Industries that benefit from the shift from offline to online commerce have been more aggressive about leveraging digital (ads). For example, direct to consumer companies in apparel, beauty, health or electronics where fundamentally now more sales can come through online whether through marketplaces or through direct to consumer billing propositions. They will invariably lean on digital even more so because of where the consumers are, the ability to nudge behaviours and the power of personalised advertising,” Mohan told The Indian Express in an interview. Facebook had in October last year changed its name to Meta.

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For the financial year 2020-21, Meta Inc-owned Facebook India Online Services had reported a 41 per cent year-on-year increase in gross advertisement revenue at Rs 9,326 crore. During this period, the net revenue of the company in India had grown to 22 per cent to Rs 1,481 crore.

The advertising revenue during this period was accelerated by change in consumer behaviour due to the pandemic, Mohan believes that the pattern has changed for good and is here to stay.

“Even as the world has started to reopen and we have had restoration of mobility, people are continuing to have deep engagement with our platforms whether that is Facebook, or Instagram or WhatsApp. A part of this is the reflection of where the attention of the consumers is. That shift to digital is real. The growth that we saw in 2020, stayed through 2021 and is continuing in 2022,” Mohan said.

An analysis by The Indian Express showed that the combined advertisement revenues of Facebook India and Google India for the year 2020-21 at Rs 23,213 crore was higher than the combined ad revenues of the top 10 listed traditional media companies at Rs 8,396 crore. Together, Facebook India and Google India corner up to 80 per cent of the domestic digital advertisement revenues.

Mohan emphasised that this is likely to continue further as advertisers target the newer generation of smartphone users that are coming online and starting to use internet more actively.

“It is the crystallisation of trends that have been at play for a long time. I do not think it happened overnight. The pandemic accelerated it. If you look at advertising or marketing more broadly, digital does allow for greater accountability as well as the ability to deliver personalised ads that is quite distinctive compared to almost every other form of media at the moment,” Mohan said.

In its February report titled ‘This Year, Next Year’ 2022, global media investment company GroupM projected that in 2022, digital will overtake television to become the largest medium and grow at around 33 per cent during the calendar year. Overall, share of digital media will grow to 45 per cent from 41 per cent, as far as the expenditure on advertisement is concerned, the report added.