Chapter 1 Introduction

The digital advertising start in the year 1994 when first online banner ad by AT&T appeared on Hotwired magazine with a run time of three months for a price of $30,000. This ad produced click-through rates of 44%. Ever since, digital advertising became popular and advertisers have been through many upheavals and needed to adopt to constantly changing technological revolutions and consumer trends.

In this project, we are intended to make a comparison among UK, US and China on their digital advertising in digital markets. We chose these countries because we believe they are the representative of European, American and Asian countries. Through this comparison, we would like to have a glimpse on the digital markets in three continents.

We proposed three research questions and hope to find the answers through the data visualization process.

  1. How does the average ad spending different among markets? How does it divided between desktop and mobile in three countries?

  2. An analysis the ad spending in different countries and in different markets. Which market has the highest return on investment ratio? Compare the average ad spending per Internet user as well as the ad spending growth rate from 2017 to 2021 and the projected ones from 2022 to 2026 in different advertising markets in three countries, which segment will the market spending most in and why may be the reason behind?

  3. Focusing on social media advertising market, how does popular social network differ in three countries and how does social network users demographic differ in three countries?

In the next sections, we will present our process of answering those questions.