Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

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Digital ad spending to pull ahead of print

Monday, March 8th, 2010

A 9.6 percent jump in digital advertising in 2010 means more money will be spent on digital ads than print for the first time this year, according to Outsell’s annual advertising and marketing study, says Forbes.

“Of the $368 billion marketers plan to spend this year, 32.5 percent will go toward digital; 30.3 percent to print,” Forbes says. “Digital spending includes e-mail, video advertising, display ads and search marketing. ‘It’s a watershed moment,’ says the study’s lead author, Outsell Vice President Chuck Richard.”

The study, which is due out today, also says that ad spending for magazines will rise this year by 1.9 percent and, quoting Richard again, “We should see far fewer closures and cutbacks among traditional media.”

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Magazine publishers press case in magazines

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Five leading magazine publishers have joined for a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to “press the case that magazines remain an effective advertising medium in the age of the Internet because of the depth and lasting quality of print, compared with the ephemeral nature of much of the Web’s content,” the Wall Street Journal said Monday.

Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, Wenner Media and Meredith will run nearly 1,400 pages of the ads  in such publications as People, Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal and other magazines this year.

“The five publishers say they have committed to run the first of the ads in the front one-fifth of their titles’ pages, and have agreed to run all subsequent ads in the first half.

“The ad space they are devoting to the campaign is valued at more than $90 million, based on public ad rates for each of their participating magazines,” the WSJ said.

Elsewhere, said the Journal, the Newspaper Association of America has run repeated ads to publicize the number of people who read a daily newspaper. As with the magazine campaign, the newspaper trade group says its ads are designed to counter the notion print is a dead medium. The local-TV industry’s trade group is starting an on-air ad campaign this month to encourage companies to advertise on their local TV stations.

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Lots of numbers, most of them bad

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Medill Reports presents a roundup of advertising spending for newspapers and magazines from 2009, including a couple of graphs and, as anyone who’s paying attention could tell you, it’s not a pleasant sight.

On the deep end, according to Nielsen figures, local Sunday newspaper supplements show a 45 percent drop in ad revenue. Business-to-business magazines show a 33 percent plunge, and local magazines sank 24 percent. (Sunday supplements and local magazines. This is why we have time to write this blog.)

The bright spots were a 32.2 percent jump for Spanish-language cable television and a 15 percent gain for cable television. FSI coupons were up 12 percent.

In a trend that extends to 2006 at least, overall U.S. advertising spending was down 9 percent for the year last year. In 2008, U.S. ad spending fell 2.6 percent.

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Targeted TV commericals advance in testing

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Almost a third fewer TV commercials were skipped in a test of targeted ads conducted by the cable giant Comcast in Baltimore last year, Ad Week says. The ability to aim commercial spots at specific households “creates billions of dollars in the TV marketplace per year,” one official said.

The test used technology developed by Invidi to deliver “different ads within the same cable network commercial breaks to different household groupings, based on segmentation data provided by data-management firm Experian,” the report says. Viewers fast-forwarded through 32 percent fewer commercials.

“It was 65 percent more efficient to buy an addressable spot to reach the advertiser’s true audience, even factoring into the calculation a premium for the seller,” said Michael Kubin, an executive vice president with Invidi. And that efficiency, he said, “on a national basis creates billions of dollars in the TV marketplace per year.”

Kubin said this second test of the system proves it works and indicates that the next step is to bring it to the marketplace.

Chuck Ross of TV Week calls the test results “nothing short of phenomenal” and his headline writer calls the test a “game changer.”

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Newspaper pre-prints the next victim of online?

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Two surveys suggest that newspapers’ pre-print inserts could go the way of classified advertising as online coupons grow in popularity, says Media Daily News.

Coupons.com –  which allows consumers to find coupons they want and print them out at home, download them to mobile devices, or transfer them to stores’ loyalty card accounts — says its digital coupon business grew 170 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, in terms of the volume of savings.

Meanwhile, a white paper released by the Newspaper Association of America and Kannon Consulting says newspaper inserts are in trouble, with big retailers like Sears demanding double-digit rate cuts and the CMO of J.C. Penney’s expressing concern that prepaid inserts don’t reach as many younger consumers. Media Daily News quotes from an analysis of the months-old proprietary white paper by the Poynter Institute’s Rick Edmonds.

The report, says Edmonds,  “warned that inserts, which account for half of retail advertising, are ‘under siege.’ The industry, notoriously pokey in providing return-on-investment metrics or in facilitating ease of placement, needs to tone up its act in a hurry, the report suggests.”

A Scarborough Research report last August said about 7 percent of U.S. households get their coupons from Web sites and about 8 percent get them via text messages or e-mail. In December, a report said spending on newspaper inserts was up 11.2 percent for the year.

In November, The News & Observer’s VP for Display Advertising cited a focus on selling pre-prints as one factor in the decision to discontinue publication of the company’s bi-monthly lifestyle magazine.

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Down is the new “up”

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

A couple of “less bad is good” stories today:

Monthly magazines’ latest quarterly decline in ad pages, at 5.7 percent, is “not the same as a gain but a much smaller loss than the double-digit plunges that have been seen since the third quarter of 2008,” Advertising Age says. Ad pages fell in 94 monthlies this quarter and grew in 59, according to the Media Industry Newsletter.

Total revenue for Lee Enterprises fell just 9.2 percent in January compared with a year ago — the first single-digit percentage decline since 2008, and the fifth consecutive month in which the year-over-year revenue comparison moderated, according to Editor & Publisher.

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McClatchy’s Pruitt: online ad model working

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt said Tuesday that deriving online revenue from advertising is working just fine and there’s no reason to move toward paywalls, according to Editor & Publisher’s account of the speech.

Pruitt gave the keynote address at the Borrell Associates Local Online Advertising Conference in New York City.

Pruitt is also OK with aggregators like Google and Yahoo, because they send plenty of traffic — 20 percent, he said — to McClatchy newspapers’ sites.

“In fact, McClatchy credits its success in building online revenue to its alignments with several different Internet players including Yahoo, Cars.com and CareerBuilder,” E&P says. “Pruitt told the Borrell conference that online revenue in 2009 accounted for 16 percent of total revenue — up from 11 percent in 2008.”

“We are very comfortable with free content supported by advertising,” Pruitt said. “We don’t view it as fatally flawed. That said, if we could make ad revenue with paid products we would.”


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More commercials likely for online TV

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

A move by Nielsen, the television ratings giant, could result in online presentations of TV programs carrying just as many commercials as broadcast does, according to Advertising Age.

Nielsen’s new methodology to compile data that take into account viewing of commercials that run in a particular show, online or off, could be in place by September so it can be used for ad sales in February 2011.  “If this system were adopted en masse — and it’s not clear that it would be — online viewing might be crammed just as full of commercials as the more traditional TV-watching experience,” Ad Age says.

And, while online sites like Hulu and Disney’s ABC.com typically have few ads, “many TV executives say these methods don’t bring much, if any, profit — and therefore cannot continue.”

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It’s a new Super Bowl record!

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

One count from the Super Bowl says there was an all-time record “nearly 39-and-a-half minutes” of ads during the game, about 90 seconds more than what was shown in 2009, says Media Daily News.

The half-hour-plus included 66 ads run by 41 different marketers (excluding NFL “house” ads), according to Kantar Media. On top of that was about eight-and-a-half minutes of CBS promos — also about 90 seconds more than 2009.

The game itself was 30 minutes shorter than in 2009, the report says.

In addition to the record number of commercials, the viewership numbering 106.5 million beat the 27-year-old record held by the final episode of “M*A*S*H,” and there were many records set during the sporting competition itself, as anyone who watched the CBS broadcast can surely tell you.

Also, “Multiple analyses were issued Monday about which ads were the most popular. … [V]otes cast via Twitter and Facebook … found that a Snickers spot with Betty White topped the charts, while one for Google about finding love in Paris was second,” Media Daily News says.

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Newspapers get small share of political ads

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Newspapers can expect to see less than 8 percent of the $4.2 billion to be spent on political advertising in 2010, a new report from Borrell Associates says. That share comes out to $329 million.

Most will go to broadcast TV with 61 percent, or $2.6 billion, Editor & Publisher’s reading of the report says, followed by cable TV at a very distant second with a 9.1 percent share. Only 1 percent, or $45 million, of political dollars is expected to be spent on Internet ads — 73 percent more than in 2008.

“Last year was relatively quiet on the political front, yet spending outpaced 2000 levels,” E&P says. “The recent Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations to now spend on politics caused Borrell analysts to bump up its forecast 10 percent.”

The Fitz & Jen blog charts the numbers for each medium.

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