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Major advertiser moves $20M from TV to online video buys

March 31, 2009 — 12:02pm ET | By Pete Wylie

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Major advertiser Reckitt-Benckiser announced it is shifting $20 million of its TV budget to online video this year, confirming the trend recently shown by an IAB report that found 126 percent year-over-year growth in online video ad revenues. Reckitt-Benckiser, which has a $475 million measured-media budget for TV, moved the $20 million to online video advertising after negotiating aggressive CPM deals with around a dozen online video ad networks.

The campaign will begin April 1, and it will feature more than 15 of the group's major name advertisers, like Lysol and Clearasil.

"We've seen a fundamental shift in consumer consumption and media habits migrating over to digital video," Marc Fonzetti, the agency's media manager and Internet specialist, told AdAge. "Obviously YouTube started it, but we want to be aligned with professional content. With broadband getting to the scale that it has, the shift has happened. The integration of traditional and digital media is here now."

As ad inventory has increased along with the amount of online video content, CPMs for online video ads have been reduced to a price point that now works for large volume commitments. This major deal shows the continued migration of TV spend to the online video space and portends another significant year-over-year revenue increase for the industry.

For more:
- see the AdAge.com article here