2007: The Year of the CPG?

An Ad Age piece from yesterday trumpets very good news for our market. Ad Age and ComScore report that packaged goods had quite a year in 2007 with traffic to industry websites growing twice as fast as the U.S. internet population.

What does this mean? For one – CPG has finally caught up with the big dogs of digital marketing. Packaged goods advertising has long been considered lagging in the digital age. According to Ad Age, ComScore attributes most of the surge to searching AND online display advertising (like banner ads on high-traffic sites). Ad Age says:

Unique visitors to package-goods brand websites soared 10% compared with a year ago in the third quarter to 66.4 million, according to data shared exclusively with Ad Age by ComScore.

The tally is double the 5% rise in the U.S. internet users to 181.9 million. Much of the growth comes from food marketers, who occupied all 10 of the top spots in ComScore’s third-quarter industry scorecard.

Less important – but plenty interesting – is this hypothesis: The new influx of grocery store staples finally finding their way online will come with a heaping helping of controversy where children’s marketing is concerned. With television ads for kid-geared products becoming more and more scrutinized by the FCC and watchdog organizations, many advertisers are finding that pitching to kids online has plenty of benefits – and they’re seeing results.