Slowdown, digital TV dent Channel 3 revenue
Bangkok Entertainment Company (BEC) has acknowledged that this year's business performance at its flagship television station, Channel 3, will experience a decline of 5-10 per cent in revenue, mainly due to the economic slowdown and intense competition f
“This year will possibly be the worst scenario in the past decade for us,” BEC executive vice president Surin Krittiyaphongphun said yesterday when describing the situation at the 45-year-old station.
Many leading advertisers have adopted a more cautious approach to cost management in light of the sluggish global economy, he said, adding that to maintain their bottom line, some multinational companies had opted to cut their ad spending at a time when their sales were likely to decline.
“Such decisions have a significant impact on the Thai media industry, as more than half of total advertising spending is from those multinationals,” he explained.
According to Nielsen (Thailand) data for the first eight months of this year, Unilever (Thai) Holdings spent about Bt5.53 billion on advertising via all media channels, a drop of 7.32 per cent from the same period last year.
Unilever is considered the country’s biggest ad spender, accounting for around 6 per cent of the industry’s income.
Although some top advertisers have maintained their spending, Surin said those companies were looking for affordable choices by experimenting with their communication budgets at digital-TV channels and online media.
“So there was no doubt that advertising expenditure via analog TV channels suffered a drop of almost 9 per cent in the first eight months,” he said.
The audience share of analog-TV operators followed suit. According to Nielsen’s viewer-share data last month, analog channels consistently declined to 64 per cent of the country’s 22.3 million households, from 85.4 per cent last year, while digital TV channels’ share surged from 14.6 per cent to 36 per cent.
However, Channel 3 has revealed that it will maintain its advertising rates for clients.
For example, during its prime-time slot, each client will continue to be charged Bt480,000 per minute.
To retain current clients’ spending with the station, the country’s second-largest TV operator says it will revamp its schedule next month with quality programmes and international TV formats.
Apart from the prevailing economic conditions, the abrupt change in the TV media landscape after last year’s arrival of terrestrial-based digital-TV broadcasting is also hurting both incumbent operators and newcomers.
Surin said BEC’s subsidiary BEC-Multimedia – the operator of 3SD, a sports-oriented channel, and 3 Family channel – acknowledged that it was hard to predict the business outcome for both digital channels.
That said, he hopes they will be able to break even within the next six years.
Meanwhile, there appears to be a different story among leading content producers. Patraporn Wannapinyo, chief executive officer of TV Thunder, said her company aimed to see at least 20-per-cent growth in revenue from Bt435 million last year, mainly thanks to assignments from new clients in digital-TV business on top of those designed by its long-term partner, Channel 3.
