The UK Advertising Association has been able to put some kind of perspective on just how bad advertising performance was during the last quarter of 2008, dropping almost 10% in revenue terms against the year ago quarter. In all, UK advertising was down just 3.9% throughout 2008, but in the fourth quarter it fell off a cliff.
The figures reflect those announced recently by Nielsen in the US, where total annual ad spend was down just 2.6%, with internet advertising bucking the trend on both sides of the Atlantic and being pretty much the only area which was up. In the US cable TV based advertising also held up well, as did advertising to Hispanic minorities.
But you get the feeling that the only reason that internet advertising was up is because there’s so much more inventory being unearthed every day, as more and more people spend more and more time on advertising driven services on the internet.
UK online advertising spend rose 17.3%, but last year grew some 39.5% over 2007 levels.
UK newspaper adspend declined most rapidly with a 12% fall over last year, with magazine not far behind down 10%. Radio was down 8.5%, direct mail fell 6%, TV was off by 4.9% and Outdoor advertising was off also 3.8%, while cinema ad revenues only slipped by 1%
Looking at the broader long term picture in the UK from 2003 to 2008 over the five years adspend rose 11%, but online ad revenues went up by 600%.The internet now has a bigger share of total adspend than magazines, outdoor, radio and cinema put together.
The long term trend for broadcast is that TV spending has fallen by 2.6% over the five years, and radio fell a staggering 13.6% over that time.
Direct mail over five years has fallen 17.3%, but we would guess that in effectiveness it has fallen far more. Newspapers are off by 15.3%, and magazines by 13.5% for the five-year period.
Conversely Outdoor adspend has risen with the invention of in-store digital signage and is up by 19.4%, and cinema’s fie year trend is up 12.9%.
Once again this is not all the recession speaking, and consumer behavior is clearly moving in favor of internet, away from broadcast media.