AD spending to take a hit in Q3
Advertising spending in the third quarter of this year is expected to see a slowdown as many businesses cut their advertising budgets to maintain their bottom lines while customer consumption was likely to fall in flood-affected areas.
Wittawat Jayapani, chief executive officer of Creative Juice\\G1 advertising agency, said that businesses in 20 provinces that faced flooding had stopped their operations several weeks ago while transport of new products to those areas was also disrupted.
He added that to maintain their bottomline, affected businesses had no choice but to cut their advertising budgets and a number of marketing events scheduled previously.
Meanwhile, customer consumption in those areas was expected to see a decline as many houses and other properties were swept way by the flooding. The locals also had limited choice to spend money on new goods and products as some discount and convenience stores were damaged.
MCOT vice president for marketing Kematat Paladesh said many big companies had reduced their advertising expenditure since July. According to a Nielsen survey last month, Unilever (Thai) Holdings spent Bt573 million on advertising, a 12-per-cent drop from Bt646 million in the same period last year.
However, Kematat added that overall the advertising industry was expected to grow by 7 to 10 per cent to Bt100 billion this year as advertisers would repurchase adverts to encourage customer demand in the last quarter.
Surin Krittayaphongphun, vice president for marketing and sales at Bangkok Entertainment, the operator of TV Channel 3, said that airtime bookings by local ad agencies remained good in October for the TV adverts industry.
“If there are no negative factors in November and December, we will see growth of 11-12 per cent in TV ad revenue for the full year. The TV industry achieved Bt55 billion to Bt60 billion in airtime revenue last year,” he said.
Jerome Hervio, managing director of Ipsos (Thailand), a leading global survey-based market research company, said that some companies might cut their advertising spending over the rest of this year and throughout next year due to the combined impact of the financial crises in Western countries and floods in many provinces in the country.
Though advertisers were saving money on advertising, he suggested that they should allocate a part of the budget cut to conduct advertising research because it would help clients develop their big idea to execute on advertising works before going on air.
