Car salesmen are earning
their online chops

Annual revenues in the automotive ad market will hold steady at $40 billion globally through 2011.

But as audiences continue to shift online, auto ad spend will as well, says a study from The Kelsey Group, reports MarketingCharts.

The report, titled Automotive and the Internet: A Category in Transition, is from Kelsey's new Marketplaces: Verticals, Classifieds & E-Commerce advisory service and analyzes those shifts.

According to the report:

• The internet's share of auto ad dollars in 2007 is 5 percent, on par with Yellow Pages and somewhat less than Radio, DM and Magazines, each of which has a share of 7 percent.

• Internet's share is expected to grow from 5 percent in 2007 to 13 percent in 2011 - or roughly on par with newspapers' share and more than all other segments' but television's.

• Traditional classifieds' share is expected to decrease from 14 percent to 10 percent, and newspapers' share from 17 percent to 14 percent, in the same period.

"The autos category, along with real estate and travel, has enjoyed the deepest, most sustained experience among all verticals in the shift online," said Peter Krasilovsky, Marketplaces program director for The Kelsey Group.

"For the auto industry, the internet represents an ongoing battle between third-party sites, OEM sites and dealers. There is unlikely to be a winner-takes-all outcome. But who gets the upper hand depends, in part, on utility to consumers, ability to create a brand and degree of local interaction."