Artificial intelligence has made hyper-personalisation in advertising possible. Companies in Germany spend around 30.9 billion euros on digital marketing. An industry with 268,000 employees.
Berlin/Germany, January 28, 2025 – Clothes in your favourite colour, hotel offers to match the flight you have already booked, tickets for concerts from your personal playlist – large parts of online advertising are now personalised. With success: 54 per cent of Germans have bought a product online at least once after seeing or hearing personalised advertising. 44 per cent even went to a local shop as a result. The majority of German internet users often see personalised advertising on social media (54%). However, consumers also often come across this form of advertising in online shops (51 per cent), via search engines (45 per cent) or email services (40 per cent). Around a third (36 per cent) also state that they frequently encounter personalised advertising on online news sites, video streaming services (36 per cent) or audio streaming services (32 per cent). These are the findings of a Bitkom study on the value contribution of digital marketing, as part of which a survey was conducted among 1,010 internet users aged 16 and over. ‘Personalised advertising is often more interesting for customers and more effective for companies than conventional, non-personalised advertising,’ says Dr Bernhard Rohleder, CEO of Bitkom.
Regardless of the product that is the subject of the personalised advertising, a good third of internet users perceive it as neutral and therefore neither particularly annoying nor particularly useful. However, there are clear differences in detail: personalised ads for everyday products are more likely to be perceived as useful, for example for food and drink (36%), clothing and accessories (35%) and entertainment (33%). In the case of very expensive or particularly individual offers or content, personalised advertising is only rated as useful by around a fifth: for example for real estate (21%), financial or insurance services (20%) and least of all for political parties (19%).
Overall, two thirds of internet users agree that without personalised online advertising, significantly more websites or online services would be chargeable (65%). It is also clear when looking at the preferred websites that the majority prefer to see adverts rather than pay for content: Just under half prefer to visit free websites with non-personalised advertising (47 percent), over a third prefer free sites with personalised advertising content, and only 16 percent say they prefer paid-for websites without advertising content.
Almost half (46%) believe that a possible ban on personalised online advertising would be detrimental to the economy and that it would have a negative impact on economic growth in Germany. This is because this form of advertising helps small companies to remain competitive due to its lower costs – almost two thirds of internet users (64 per cent) believe this. And companies in niche markets would also find it much more difficult to reach their customers without personalised online advertising – two thirds are also convinced of this (63%).
Digital marketing as an economic factor
Digital marketing, which includes personalised online advertising, now represents a significant economic sector. Expenditure in the sector has been rising continuously for years and is defying economic crises. In 2024, total expenditure, including personnel costs, amounted to 30.9 billion euros. Employment is also growing steadily: since 2018, the number of jobs in the industry has risen by around half, totalling 267,821 direct employees in digital marketing in 2024. Salaries in this sector are also increasing: from an average of just under €49,000 in 2018 to a good €63,500 in 2024. This corresponds to an average annual growth rate of 4.43 per cent over this six-year period. The state also benefits: Tax revenues from income in the digital marketing sector amounted to 7.56 billion euros for 2024, which is around 24.5 per cent of total expenditure.
How AI will change digital marketing
In parallel to economic growth, the introduction of AI into companies is also changing the skills profiles in digital marketing. AI specialists are already in high demand: around one in ten job advertisements explicitly require AI skills and use keywords such as ‘AI’, ‘ChatGPT’ or ‘Prompt’ (8 per cent). In the job advertisements of companies with 501 to 1,000 employees, 14 per cent already contain the keyword ‘AI’. This trend is set to intensify further in the future: ‘For newcomers and those returning to digital marketing, skills in dealing with AI will become indispensable in the coming years. As a rule, the corresponding applications will not replace human specialists, but will support them in their work and thus make them more productive,’ says Rohleder. Traditional qualifications and characteristics such as a degree (38 percent), professional experience (34 percent), social media (31 percent), SEO (search engine optimisation, 25 percent) or creativity (20 percent) will nevertheless remain important.
The influence of AI is already making itself felt in everyday digital marketing tasks. For example, language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini are already firmly established in the creation of content such as texts, images, music and videos. In addition, AI allows resources to be utilised in a more targeted manner across all digital marketing channels. The possibilities range from automated tests and budget adjustments in campaign management to more precise identification and automatic segmentation in target group analysis and predictive analyses of purchasing behaviour or ad performance. The demand for specialists who can utilise these benefits for companies is growing accordingly. New job profiles are emerging, such as AI trainers or data ethicists, and marketers will no longer be able to avoid mastering at least basic AI skills.
For personalised online advertising, artificial intelligence will mean one thing above all in the future: hyper-personalisation. AI makes it possible to tailor adverts with the utmost precision. Rohleder: ‘Hyper-personalisation is the next level of digital marketing. With the help of real-time data or precise behavioural analyses, content and offers can be tailored even more precisely to customers,’ emphasises Bitkom CEO Rohleder.
Translated with DeepL_com
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Bitkom graphic Majority of Germans buy because of personalised advertising nuetzlich-stoerend