First of all, before I get any emails from the SherpaCult: I love MarketingSherpa. The owner Anne Holland once claimed that she loved my writings and that I was the most influential dude in interactive advertising, so why wouldn’t I like them. MarketingSherpa is a great source for about anything – they know almost everything about anything in interactive media. I swear, somewhere in their archives they have a list of what toilet paper agency CEOs use. If Anne and Goeff Ramsey of emarketer had a baby, can you imagine?

That being said, I have a serious problem with a chart that they came out with recently, which made some ridiculous claims about the growth of social media and worse, the death of display?

 
This is their chart of the week, which claims, among other things, that Social Media is 11% of marketer’s budgets, 19% being email and only 6% in display advertising. I find these numbers to be complete and utter BS, and I’m curious if numbers were moved around in order to get attention for the growth in social media and a great press release

The most ridiculous number here is the claim that only 6% of the budget is in display, which would include sponsorships, banners, video and so on.   After asking some experts, most of them pointed out why these numbers are most likely fudged:

 Grouping PPC into one category is a huge problem, since much of the PPC program have nothing to do whatsoever with search. If you go to MSNBC, you’ll see tons of ads for teeth whitening from Pulse360. These are nothing more than text based (with small picture) display on a cost per click, and is a type of display advertising.

In order to get more press, everyone likes to talk about social media – so they group almost all advertising on social media into one category. You know, since Facebook is the next big thing, they’d like to claim that social media is on the rise. However, they are ignoring that companies like Facebook make almost all their money on display, and it’s not really “social media advertising” it’s a type of display advertising

Most of the major internet portals still rely on display advertising as their predominate way of making money. Companies like AOL make a huge amount of money sending visitors with clever ads that seem like stories to shopping pages where there are links to their advertisers. There is some claim amongst the search industry that this is search – but it’s not really. No one is going to google and asking for the information, but instead being pushed to a website about the information with links to services. These “sponsored links” are display.

I don’t believe these numbers at all, and would love if someone could provide other studies and the methodology used to make these and similar claims.

I’d love people’s comments.