Magna Global cut its forecast for U.S. advertising revenue growth this year to 5.1% from 6% on Tuesday, because ad spending the first half of the year was weaker than expected. But the Interpublic-owned media buying and research firm expects the ad market to bounce back in the second half of the year, and see its strongest growth rate in a decade in 2015.
The revision in domestic advertising revenues down to $167 billion this year is mostly due to lower spending on Olympic and political ad campaigns than it was originally expecting, the firm said, in addition to a softer-than-expected market in the first half of the year. Magna Global noted there are many isolated factors behind the weak ad market in the latest quarter, but it is not significantly changing its forecast for the next two quarters.
Excluding the impact of political campaigns and the Olympics, U.S. ad growth is expected to be 3.5% this year down from the previously forecast 3.9% and from the 4.4% growth in 2013.
On a normalized basis, television revenues are expected to grow 2.2% this year. Newspaper and magazine ad revenue are expected to decline 8.9% and 11% respectively, while digital ad revenues are expected to jump 17% this year to $50 billion. Radio sales are expected to contract 3% this year, a larger decline than last year. Outdoor media sales are projected to improve 1.7%, a slowdown compared to the mid-single digit growth rate seen in the past three years.
Despite a pick up in the broader economy, there was a sharp slowdown in ad spending growth in the second quarter from the first quarter. Excluding political and Olympic campaigns, advertising spending increased 2% in the second quarter following 4.6% growth in the first quarter. Magna Global attributed the slowdown in part to circumstantial factors such as a delayed market response to the unexpected economic dip in the first quarter, an imbalanced first half (last year’s second quarter, for example, was much stronger than the first quarter) and the shift of some advertisers’ budgets from the second-quarter into the first quarter to take advantage of marketing opportunities around the Winter OlympicsOlympicsOlympics. The World Cup tournament in June and July played a reverse role in attracting money in the second-quarter at the expense of the first and third quarters, but on a much smaller scale that could not offset the Olympic shift.
The second-quarter slowdown was perhaps most noticeable in television — Magna Global estimates overall TV advertising revenue was flat last quarter, with an especially weak performance among English-speaking broadcast networks. The research firm acknowledged that another reason behind the slowdown in TV revenue was the accelerating shift of ad dollars towards digital media. The estimated 15% growth of online video last quarter was mostly fueled by dollars that were moved out of traditional television advertising, Magna Global said.
As the economy strengthens, Magna Global projects the U.S. ad market to experience its strongest year-over-year growth in ten years in 2015 and to post a new all-time high of $172 billion in advertising revenues. The firm now projects 2015 U.S. ad growth of 3.3%, up from its previous estimate of 2.4% growth. Excluding the impact of political and Olympic ad campaigns, 2015 ad revenues are expected to improve 4.9%, compared with a prior 4.5% growth outlook.
One in three ad dollars next year is expected to be spent on digital media, Magna Global said. The firm now projects digital media to grow 16% in 2015, up from its prior view of 13% growth. Digital media is projected to outgrow TV by 2017, when revenues will reach $72 billion compared with TV sales of $70.5 billion, Magna Global said.
Meanwhile, the firm reduced its forecasts of TV ad revenue growth to 2.3% from 3.8% for 2015. Other traditional media formats will benefit from stronger overall ad growth, but will continue to lose market share and ad dollars to digital media next year. Newspaper and magazine ad sales are expected to fall 6.2% and 9.4%, respectively, in 2015. Meanwhile, radio ad sales will improve slightly at 0.5% and out-of-home will rise 3.4% in 2015, Magna Global projects
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Local-Direct will increase substantially for those radio companies whose owners and managers focus or growing that important revenue sector. Those who continue to stoke the agency dollar will be left out in the cold as programmatic buying and real time bidding enters each marketplace allowing small and large companies to selected specific sex, age, income and behavior targets who had previously investigated their website using available re-targeting tools whose audience can be accessed on a cost-per-thousand basis.
The consumer targets, ie.. audience will be classified as "inventory" as those who have shopped on line previously.
Another trend is "showrooming," the practice of examining merchandise in a traditional brick and mortar retail store or other offline setting, and then buying it online, sometimes at a lower price. Online stores often offer lower prices than their brick and mortar counterparts because they do not have the same overhead cost.
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D. .
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