It is easy to be confused by the complexity of the advertising industry. I am studying it so I can understand my future customers.

This article will explore the high level choices that the brand Cowboy Binoculars has in advertising their product (a pair of binoculars well suited for the modern cowboy). Observe Cowboy Binoculars brand below:

.

In 2015 Bloomberg made predictions about the future market size of advertising industry segments in 2017, specifically that digital ads would overtake TV ads by 2017. A recent article by adage.com observes that this prediction has already occurred.

TV Advertising

When I think of advertising, the form that most easily comes to mind are advertisements on TV. TV holds a large share of the advertising market, predicted at 37%. This market share has been on the decline, and a recent report by PWC suggests that TV is now primarily watched by sports fans ( PWC TV Advertising Insights ).

Print Media: Newspapers and Magazines

A much older form of advertising is in print media. Newspapers and Magazines are still commonplace and are an advertising channel, yet these forms of advertising have a very small market share, with a predicted 9% and 4% of the advertising spend respectively.

Radio

Radio Ads, such as traffic reports that roll into ads, have a predicted 6% of the advertising market share.

Out of Home

An important segment that is growing is the out of home segment (6%). This segment has a strange name but includes billboards on the side of buildings, digital street signs on bus stops and advertisements on taxi's and buses. A recent report by PWC includes this category in their market segment breakdown.

Digital

An increasingly important market segment is the Digital Advertising market. As mentioned in the introduction, it has recently supplanted TV as the largest advertising segment, having achieved 38% market share suggests that these predictions on market share have recently been found to be true.

Digital advertising includes all ads that occur through mobie phones or computers, such as: Product recommendations on shopping sites such as Amazon.com, Search related advertisements appearing on Google Search, social network feed advertisements such as Facebook feed advertisements, banner ads and pre-roll advertisements that occur before videos on YouTube.