CANnual Report 2017
The third CANnual Report, a comprehensive guide to the advertising industry in Central and Eastern Europe, was launched in Prague on 17 October at the CANnual Conference 2017. The conference and report are produced by weCAN, a network of independent advertising and media agencies across the region. The 2017 edition focuses on content marketing and is available at: http://cannualreport.wecan.net/2017#/hello.
weCAN is the largest independent agency network in Central and Eastern Europe. It brings together independent advertising agencies and media houses from 16 countries. One of its primary goals is to share expertise on the CEE advertising industry both internally and externally. This is why weCAN, among other things, has been publishing the CANnual Report for the past three years, which provides information on the situation and marketing trends in the CEE region and in individual countries.
This year's report includes cross-sectional analysis and detailed descriptions of advertising markets in 14 countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Russia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Hungary. The authors of the chapter on Poland are: Weronika Szwarc-Bronikowska - Executive Vice President for Strategy and Development Media People, Dawid Bartosik - Content Director Walk and Grzegorz Dzięgielewski - Content Designer Walk.
In 2016, television remained the region’s leading advertising medium despite a slight decline. Outdoor and radio maintained their shares at 9% and 6% respectively. Digital continued to grow as print declined: the gap between their shares widened from 4 percentage points in 2014 to 17 in 2016, and from 22 to 32 points in Poland. Lithuania joined the Czech Republic and Hungary as a market where digital expenditure exceeded television. Poland, Russia and Slovakia could be next, with gaps of only 2–5 percentage points between the two media.
Giants such as Facebook and Google have contributed greatly to the growth of digital in Central and Eastern Europe. Last year, YouTube had the highest user growth, at 10% in almost every country, while the number of new Facebook users increased by 3-5% and Instagram by 5-10%. These three portals are also the most used in most countries in the CEE region. The exceptions are Russia and Ukraine, where VKontakte is the leader, and Latvia, with Draugiem on the podium.
Due to the growing importance of digital, the theme of this year's report was content marketing. The slogan “Content is King” was used by Bill Gates in the title of an article as early as 1996, but it was not until the era of the Internet and digital that it became the prevailing motto of „advertising people.” One of the key elements in this process was the introduction by online media of the possibility of user segmentation, which allowed brands to reach strictly selected groups of potential customers. In Poland, this is very well shown by the graph of the popularity of searches for the phrase “content marketing” in Google. In 2014-2015, interest in the topic tripled compared to 2010-2011, and remains at a similar level today.
