AdAge

'Day of Reckoning' Coming: Marketers Sound Off on Skyrocketing Sports Prices

Marketers such as Honda are increasingly fed up with sky-high prices associated with sports marketing. They warn a "day of reckoning" is coming when Madison Avenue will just say "No" to hyper-expensive sports programming such as the Super Bowl.

As one of the last bastions of DVR-proof TV, the price of sports -- from the prices paid by marketers for sponsorships and 30-second ads to TV rights paid by media companies -- continues to climb. But it's rare for marketers to publicly declare they're reaching the end of their rope. And to threaten to move their ad dollars away from sports media and into cheaper social and digital marketing.

But that's what they did during one panel at the 2014 IMG World Congress of Sports presented by SportsBusiness Daily. When Terry Lefton, editor-at-large for SBJ, asked whether marketers had finally reached a tipping point with escalating sports prices, several marketers sounded off.

Tom Peyton, assistant VP-advertising for American Honda, noted that the auto-maker devotes 18% to 22% of its annual media budget to sports. And the company isn't getting more sports for its money. It's just paying higher and higher prices. The time is coming when resentful marketers like Honda could decide enough is enough. "It could go very quickly. Yeah, the day of reckoning is soon," said Petyon.

Facebook Eats Away At Google's Share Of Mobile Ad Pie

Mobile advertising is swiftly becoming a two-horse race. According to the latest eMarketer forecast, mobile ad spending worldwide grew by 105% in 2013 and is on pace to expand to $31.5 billion in 2014.

And the two Internet giants, Google and Facebook, are increasingly taking the lion's share -- the pair netted 67% of mobile ad revenues in 2013, up from 58% in 2012.

The current report marks yet another adjustment from the research firm, as mobile ad dollars balloon far faster than expected. The final spending figure of $18 billion is nearly double the firm's estimates from just four months ago. Much of the tweaking is due to Facebook, whose share of net revenues more than tripled, to 18%, in 2013, only its second year in the mobile ad business.

Welcome to the New First Screen: Your Phone

Say hello to the new first screen: your phone. Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the US for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.

Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147 in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere.

In China, consumers spend a whopping 170 minutes a day buried in smartphones, nearly double their TV watching time. Users in Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil and Vietnam also spend more total screen minutes on average than the US, predominately on mobile. The firm surveyed more than 12,000 mobile users, between the ages of 16 and 44, in 30 different countries, polling consumption of ads over TVs, laptops, smartphones and tablets.