Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of WPP, Martin Sorrell spoke at the recent FICCI-FRAMES event. The head honcho of the world’s biggest advertising group underlined the immense power of online medium.

He stated the group now reserved nearly $850-900 million of its advertising money on search domain alone (Google in particular). For record, WPP spends close to 27 percent of its clients’ ad spends online and Sorrell revealed the figure would soon touch one-third of their total business.

According to one industry estimate, users spend nearly 9.5 hours consuming different media. Of them, television accounts for almost 34 percent of the total time spent whereas Internet takes up nearly 30 percent; the rest is spent on magazines and newspapers. Sorrell though, does not wholly subscribe to this set of numbers. He feels the total time consumed by online media is around 20 percent, whereas users in India pass 12 to 14 percent of their time on the Internet. He qualifies, however, that the numbers are increasing rapidly.

According to the president (global sales operations & business development) of Google, Nikesh Arora, online advertising will largely be driven by the need felt for ‘instant gratification to get information’. He noted during his speech at the event that users perform almost 2-3 billion searches every day. If there was roughly five exabytes (one exabyte is nearly 40,000 hr of TV program) of info five years ago, the same number is expected to have risen to 80 exabytes.

In other words, search is now a must to unravel the flood of data pouring. He predicts that almost 30 percent of all content across the globe will get digitized in the coming five to ten years. Users will then increasingly turn to the Internet for buying and communicating. This will make online advertising a far more fruitful and powerful platform than it is now.