Peru is divided into three natural regions: costa, sierra and selva (coast, highlands and jungle), each with distinct characteristics that affect human settlement as well as their economic and technological development. These geographic and economic factors, alongside a conservative mentality when it comes to adopting new technologies, has resulted in a very cautious digital media uptake among consumers, which in turn has given advertisers reason to wait before shifting advertising budgets to the web.
A new eMarketer report, “Digital Ad Spending Benchmarks in Peru: A Conservative Market Slowly Coming to Digital Life,” projects expenditures on web ads will rise 25.0% to reach $81.8 million in 2015. By comparison, digital ad spending in Latin America as a whole will total $6.82 billion during the same period, with the largest regional market, Brazil, contributing 49.9% of that total. The modest amount of digital ad spending in Peru will stay that way for some time, but it will nearly double between 2015 and 2019, reaching $153.2 million by the end of the forecast period.
Unsurprisingly, Peru is the smallest of the six Latin American markets that eMarketer estimates digital ad spending for (the others are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico), both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of its overall media ad spending. Smaller than Chile which boasts a population less than half of Peru’s.
The lag in digital ad spending can be traced to the mighty effect of the natural regions over the country’s socioeconomic and digital development. According to Peru’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (INEI), the top three departments (i.e. provinces) in the widely accessible coast region contributed 52.7% to the country’s GDP in 2013 and will be home to 43.5% of the population in 2015. INEI also estimates that 50.1% of the coastal residents ages six and older were internet users in 2013, compared to 27.8% of people living in the highlands and 21.5% for those living in the jungle region.
eMarketer estimates there will be 16.0 million internet users of any age accessing the web at least monthly in Peru this year. While an encouraging 52.6% of the country’s population will be regular digital media users this year, Peru ranks last by this metric in absolute terms—and second to last by penetration—when compared to the other six markets for which we produce individual estimates.
eMarketer corporate subscription clients can view the full report here.