Growth in global ad spend is industry’s “crumb of comfort”
Raymond Snoddy says that the latest advertising spend figures are certainly good news for most, but its at the local level where some of the most positive developments are taking place, and not in the area you might expect…
Great news from Nielsen – advertising spending is up, up and up on every available medium. Well, almost.
Radio has put on 7.9% year-on-year growth; outdoor 6.4%; cinema 4.1%; newspapers 3.1% and television 2.8%. Of course the internet runs away with the top prize with a rise of 12.1%. Only magazines are showing a modest 1.4% dip.
It’s great news and a clear sign that consumer confidence is returning, but not everywhere.
The problem is the latest good news flows from a global average and tells us very little about what is happening in Euro-ridden, triple recession-threatened Europe. A lot of the hot action is coming from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.
The rise in newspaper advertising is mostly accounted for by a 10.3% increase in advertising in Latin America and a growth rate of 5.4% in Asia Pacific.
Television advertising, which still raises the most money of any advertising medium globally, saw a 4% increase in America and a whopping 33.8% rise in the Middle East and Africa. Internet advertising just kept growing everywhere as you would expect.
But from the global good news to warm your hands in front of momentarily to two interesting and very particular recent developments involving local newspapers and magazines in the UK. They are not exactly earth-shattering, but are encouraging all the same.
The newspaper initiative
First is the Local Business Accelerators awards – a splendid wheeze dreamt up by the St Luke’s advertising agency for the Newspaper Society.
The necessary stimulus was a no-strings-attached £250,000 cheque from Sir Ray Tindle to do something positive by way of PR for an industry that is too often dismissed as dying if not actually dead.
Tindle’s money could so easily have been wasted. Instead a textbook campaign has been successfully executed.
More than 3,000 local companies, which had to be less than three years old, took part in the hope of winning mentoring from a local business big shot and free advertising in their local paper.
The 12 national finalists competed to secure business mentoring from Dragons Den diva Deborah Meaden and with it a further burst of complimentary advertising.
On the day of the awards there was even a message of support from David Cameron noting how local papers can support and energise new businesses and secretary of state for business, education and skills, Vince Cable came to bless the proceedings.
Since you ask, the winner was the Ilkley Brewery and to continue the liquid theme Boozeberries, a specialist liqueur producer from Northern Ireland, was highly commended. And very good their products were too.
Nice publicity for all concerned and the Local Business Accelerators competition will be held again next year.
More importantly for the local newspaper industry, the competition produced a plethora of case studies to show how effective local advertising can be.
Footfall in babywear shop Glow Maternity increased by 50% following the LBA ad campaign in the North Devon Journal.
Online sales for Fudge Fancies, another commended entrant, rose by 20% after an ad campaign featured in the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette. Source Science was able to expand its adult education programme by an extra 100 people following a series of ads in the Lancashire Telegraph.
Modest stuff perhaps but it is a really good example of an industry under pressure doing something to try to save itself rather than standing around handwringing.
The magazine initiative
The other example – magazines – involves original research commissioned by Bauer into the importance of media “influence” in determining consumer behaviour – a sort of proxy for engagement.
Looking at the power of influence is not exactly a new concept in marketing. A seminar on the research, The Anatomy of Influence, was told that there have already been 130 papers and at least 30 case studies on the subject.
Bauer’s gimmick was to look at the principal drivers of a magazine brand’s influence – head (behavioural attributes), heart (emotional attributes) and hand (action attributes) – based on 2,700 online interviews and come up with a score. An equal number of readers of Bauer magazines and its rivals were included.
All the signs are that the research by Kantar Media was objective and perfectly respectable. The usual caveat has to be made and it was one that was happily conceded publicly by Bauer executives.
The results in general showed that the main Bauer titles such as Grazia and Empire had a high influence score. More! – less so.
We can be certain that if the results demonstrated irrefutably that Bauer publications had a low influence score then there would have been no seminar in the Soho Hotel.
Bauer was able to claim, however, that through the usual scaling up its media brands drive 42 million actions by consumers.
Rather like the Local Business Accelerators, the Bauer research was a good step forward towards an important objective and deserves more general support. What if an all-industry measure of influence and therefore engagement could be created?
There are worries about attaching numerical scores to emotional attributes and some noted the dangers of circularity of argument – that good magazines have influence simply because they are good magazines.
Yet there is a clear sense that while counting viewers and readers is fine and dandy, something more sophisticated is required in the longer term. As always, the marketing industry wants to know more.
The usual problem applies – no one is all that keen to pay for the greater level of sophistication.
At least in the meantime, however, we know that global advertising spending in the media is rising and that is some small comfort.