MARKETERS and agency executives live and die by numbers. Share of market, share of voice and share of revenue tell them if they are rising up the corporate ladder or sliding down the snake.
So the release this week, with the authority of PricewaterhouseCoopers no less, of ''official'' figures on how much we are spending on online advertising was discomfiting.
I suspect we were all too mesmerised by the magic figure of $2 billion spent on online advertising in the past financial year to notice some glaring omissions.
For instance, we don't know the split for the roughly $1 billion spent on ads in search engines such as Google and for space in directories such as yellowpages.com.au. And we don't know how much of the $500 million spent on display ads goes into social networking, which is dominated by Facebook. Nor do we know the true figure on ads sold before videos, a market set to boom as more eyeballs shift online. PwC reported it as a paltry $25 million, though the real figure might be twice that amount. The thing is we just don't know, and nor will we if the likes of Google, Facebook and Sensis have their way.
Why? Because vested interests are ensuring that we will never know. Google will never hand over its figures to PwC, which merely collects the data and does not audit it. More than 90 per cent of all searches in Australia are through its search engine, so estimates of Google's share of the market for search keywords are thought to be similarly large. In addition, Sensis won't break out the amount it receives from advertisers wishing to advertise before videos on Telstra's BigPond, because it doesn't want to reveal its share.
It therefore keeps that figure hidden in an aggregated number. A cynic would suggest it is probably embarrassingly small, so all the better to hide it. YouTube also remains a blind spot. It does sell some ads before videos, but it also sells keywords next to video content as well as banner ads across its sites. In other words its activity goes across the spectrum, but because it is owned by Google it will not divulge any figures. Facebook, which does the bidding of its head office, as is so often the case with these global high-tech companies, cites a global policy that says it will not reveal to anyone what its revenues are.
What is laughable is that they are all members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a body set up to market the medium to advertisers and media buying agencies, and here they are letting their vested interests get in the way of expanding the medium. All of these areas - search, video advertising and social networking - are set to be the booming areas of the future, and here we are dealing in guesstimates.
''It's very problematic. In order for us to get where we are going, then we need to have accurate figures,'' said John Murray, chief executive of Australia's largest digital ad agency, emitch.
Australia already suffers from a monopoly of information. Just look at the Nielsen Company. It collates radio ratings data; retail sales data based on items scanned at the checkout; expenditure on advertising based on rate cards and the number of ads booked; and online audience measurement.
Not everyone is happy with this. Only last week the head of the largest media buying group in Australia, John Steedman of Group M, told a gathering of analysts how he was now working off ''real data'' that was ''reliable and accurate'' rather than what he believed were the ''guesstimates'' from Nielsen the industry had been working off before.
In his presentation about the growth of the media market to investors of STW Communications, a marketing services company, Steedman used data from SMI, the research company that compiles media booking data from the country's largest media buying agencies to give revenue figures.
If guesstimates are no longer good enough for the likes of Steedman, then why should an industry that has a greater claim than any to be the future rely on the same?
