Golden Hundred Russian Digital 2015 and key market development trends

Hi, Megamind! We published our main rating this year - the Golden Hundred of Russian Digital 2015 (and also revealed market development trends under crisis conditions). This is a rather non-standard chart that unites studios and agencies from all segments of the market (development, advertising, promotion, mobile, etc.).

The hundred came out this year for the third time, this year the top was headed by GRAPE , Ingate was in second place, and Articul Media received the bronze. The method is based on a rather complicated (but transparent) mechanism for analyzing all local ratings existing in the market (this time they analyzed the database on 56 charts right away) - and a summary Hundred is built on them.


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In addition to the rating itself, as part of a comprehensive study, we have compiled a list of the most important factors / trends that influence the interactive communications market in times of crisis:

The crisis year 2015 has become expectedly difficult for the Russian digital market. Active growth of volumes is observed only in the segment of mobile development and marketing, as well as the direction of contextual advertising. The remaining segments of the market show a slight increase or a slight decrease in volumes, and the online media advertising market showed a significant drop in the first months of 2015 (according to ACAR data from January-March 2015).

Based on the results of a number of our own market research, analytical data and surveys of the heads of large agencies, we formulated a number of important trends / factors that have a significant impact on the market during 2015:

• Sharp fluctuations in the foreign exchange and stock markets, foreign economic and foreign policy risks form a high level of uncertainty in the digital communications market. The percentage of clients' “refusal” from working on current and new, just signed contracts increases, budgets flow from one client industry to another, often the agencies themselves force up the situation on an emotional level.
  
  If we talk about real indicators, most of the agencies show stagnation or a slight increase in turnover, and quite optimistically describe the prospects for the development of their business (at the same time, a number of agencies have already encountered really serious financial problems). What most agency representatives almost unanimously agree on is the rapid growth in receivables for work already completed, and this is probably the only statistically confirmed crisis factor of a financial nature.
  
  
• “Average prices” for various channels of digital communications have already reached a certain level of maturation and saturation, and are no longer unequivocally more attractive than similar channels of offline communications. Therefore, in comparison with the crisis of 2008–2009, one should not expect a massive overflow of client budgets from offline to online in 2015.
  
  
• The key trend, which, one way or another, all market experts mention, is “measurability”. The measurability of metrics across channels, the measurability of ROI and other KPIs, the measurability of the whole process of agency interaction with the client in the broad sense of the word.
  
  
• Continuing the conversation about measurability - one of the most significant trends was the development of the ideology of Performance Based Marketing and the focus on this scheme of work with large customers of many key market agencies. It is also necessary to note the increased attention of large agencies to CRM / eCRM tools and increasing competence in this area, as well as the active development of RTB tools and the ideology of Programmatic Buying.
  
  
• The active process of M & A (mergers and acquisitions), which we described for the first time as an important trend last year, continues. The crisis only contributes to the unification of complementary agencies (due to a possible reduction in costs), and the multidirectional vectors of growth and decline in various agencies only fuel the attractiveness of takeovers and acquisitions by large players of smaller agencies.
  
  
• Like last year, the process of pressure on the segment of small agencies operating in the low price range is intensified by SaaS services, which are rapidly gaining popularity in the SMB segment.
  
  
• For several years in a row, due to the constant rotation of personnel from agencies to the customer side, the level of competence of the end customer has been growing, and this is good news.
  
  
• The list of the most acute problems of the agency market, unfortunately, remains almost unchanged. This is a low threshold for entering the market, a large rotation of one-day agencies, a finely-dispersed distribution of players (more than 10,000 operating agencies in Russia), a low average level of customer service and support, a weak level of strategic expertise, and a frequent lack of competences in their own marketing aspect. agencies. Is that personnel shortage and the overall level of overheated salaries is gradually declining.

On Ruvard you can see the complete Top 100 , the extended Top 300 agencies hundreds, as well as a number of interesting comments.