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| Mixed year for advertising |
| Seema Sindhu / New Delhi Dec 29, 2008, 00:45 IST |
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AD WORLD: Among media events, the Indian Premier League stole the show in 2008.
It was a year of crests and troughs for the advertising industry. At the start of the year, the outlook was very positive: GDP was expected to grow in excess of 9 per cent.
Other signs of economic buoyancy included luxury brands setting up operations in India, luxury car launches and the booming real estate sector. The financial sector growth indicated that 2008 would be a fantastic year.
Besides, with several TV channels and print media products waiting to be launched, the media industry was set to boom. In fact new channels like 9X, NDTV Imagine and Colors pumped lots of money into the system as they advertised heavily.
The launch of these channels also gave advertisers more choice in looking for the right target audience. It was a great year with sports properties such as the Indian Premier League (BCCI’s T20 cricket event), the Zee-promoted Indian Cricket League, F1 and marathons being added to the list.
R Gowthaman, Leader, South Asia, Mindshare, says: “The biggest highlight of the year was the success of IPL and the arrival of a long-term property.”
Mona Jain, India Head, Strategic Investments, India Media Exchange, (a division of Publicis Groupe Media), adds: “IPL was able to push General Entertainment Channels to re-look at their pricing and rationalise the highly exaggerated benchmarks they were being sold at.”
Post-IPL, the India-Australia and India-England cricket matches too were strong and sold well. On the back of these events, during Jan-Sep 2008, the industry grew by 23 per cent over last year Jan-Sep. But the scene changed October onwards. The combined impact of subprime crisis and the global markets meltdown on India Inc started affecting advertising spends.
Sandeep Madan, executive vice president, Rediffusion — Y&R, Delhi, says: “Diwali spends were 15 per cent lower than 2007 and since festival time spends account for a big chunk during the second half of the year, 2008–09 would not be in line with expectations.”
Adds Mona Jain: “Despite heavy discounting by media, there were no buyers. The television industry’s technicians’ strike (in November) further dampened the market thereby affecting ad spends. Spends went down almost 40 per cent in the last quarter.”
Radio advertising continued to do well. Print advertising was the hardest hit due to slowdown and the increase in advertising rates. Digital media (Internet, mobile and digital signage) grew the most and will continue to do so as their ROI is far better and easily measurable. Analysts believe digital will grow by over 80 per cent YOY since its base is very small.
Preeti Mascarenhas, chief strategy officer, Allied Media (Percept’s media agency), testifies: “Rising interest in social networking in 2008 has made brands think seriously about leveraging it.” The traditional media will not grow more than 13 per cent next year.
The media industry has been growing in double digits for more than a decade. It grew by over 22 per cent in 2007–08 (Rs 19,700 crore). But in FY09, the growth rate may go down to a single digit.
Says Gowthaman: “We believe that AdEx (the advertising monitoring service) will revise it to 15-16 per cent as against the initial estimate of 18-20 per cent, for FY08. Going into 2009, we believe that the advertising industry will only grow by 8-9 per cent.”
Next year, the industry is pinning hope on DTH, telecom (services and handsets), education and healthcare categories.
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