Overall ad spending plummets 9.5%
As expected, total advertising expenditure last year suffered a huge drop - 9.5 per cent - to Bt102.34 billion from Bt113 billion in 2013, mainly due to major advertisers holding back on spending in mainstream media, according to the latest survey by Niel
Though the media industry believes that advertising spending last month might show an improvement, Nielsen found that it actually fell in December by 11.5 per cent to Bt8.46 billion from Bt9 billion a year earlier.
The figures exclude house ads, classifieds, and cable, satellite and digital terrestrial television.
However, if the figures included Bt12.07 billion spent on digital terrestrial TV channels and Bt7.18 billion on cable and satellite TV (not including TrueVisions), total expenditure would see a drop of 3 per cent year on year.
Advertising expenditure via major media such as TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, cinemas, billboards and in-store media suffered huge declines.
Partly because of the arrival of new terrestrial-based digital television channels and the economic slowdown, ad spending on incumbent analog TV channels witnessed a 7.9-per-cent decline to Bt63.78 billion from Bt69.25 billion in 2013. However, TV was still the most important advertising medium, accounting for 62.31 per cent of total spending.
Newspapers also faced a big drop of 13.7 per cent to Bt13.16 billion from BtBt15.26 billion the previous year. Radio adverts saw an 11-per-cent decrease to Bt5.62 billion from Bt6.32 billion. Magazines witnessed a 16.8-per-cent drop to Bt4.72 billion from Bt5.67 billion.
Cinemas suffered a decrease of almost 19 per cent to Bt3.45 billion from Bt5.37 billion. Outdoor advertising such as billboards saw a 4.25-per-cent drop to Bt3.99 billion. In-store media were hit hard, with a drop of 26 per cent to Bt1.96 billion from Bt2.66 billion.
It appeared that only transit and Internet advertising enjoyed growth. Internet spending witnessed 8.32-per-cent growth to Bt950 million from Bt877 million, while transit media raked in Bt3.8 billion, up 7.82 per cent from Bt3.53 billion the previous year.
Among top brands, Toyota spent Bt1 billion to advertise its passenger cars, lower than Bt1.1 billion in 2013. Another big brand, Coca-Cola, also cut its advertising budget to Bt935 million from Bt1 billion.
PTT Group, AIA Life Insurance, Isuzu pickups, Honda passenger cars, Tesco Lotus and Wall’s ice cream also trimmed their ad budgets.
