Google Vs. Facebook: Will There Be An Online Advertising War In 2015?

In the last few years Facebook Inc FB has been gaining significant grounds in the online advertising space. Even though no can question Google Inc GOOGL supremacy in that front, Facebook is increasingly becoming advertisers’ favourite destination and can perhaps pose as a serious threat to Google in 2015.

Colin Sebastian from Robert W. Baird was on CNBC to discuss Facebook’s outlook for 2015 and the competition it may give Google in the advertising space.

“Well, Facebook is really at the epicentre of massive secular shifts in mobile and so you know for 2015 certainly that will be the predominant force for growth for Facebook and really they have established itself as the most legitimate mobile app platform at a high scale. Now, incremental to that we see a couple of things,” Sebastian said.

He continued, “Number one, video […] the slow melting ice cube, if you will, of TV ad spends is starting to accelerate and Facebook is one of the companies well positioned to capture that spend and then secondly, Facebook will begin to power advertising off of its application across the broader web and that network effect itself in advertising will be strong enough in our view.”

Google Versus Facebook

“Well, there is no doubt in terms of incremental ad spend online that Facebook is capturing an increasing share of that, but what we hear from advertisers is that they are not allocating budget away from Google. So, the competition is for that incremental spend. In that case Facebook will grow faster than Google, but both platforms are positioned to continue to gain share,” Sebastian added.