Digital Up, TV Dips In Q4 Media Spend

by Wayne Friedman, Yesterday, 10:50 AM 

A marked slowdown in the last quarter of 2014 occurred in the U.S. advertising market. Standard Media Index says the market was flat in the fourth quarter of 2014 versus the same period in 2013. Only digital media spending witnessed a rise, up 15% versus the same time period a year ago to $7.6 billion.

More traditional TV media moved in the other direction. National broadcast TV spending was down 2% to $4.8 billion, and cable TV gave up 1.6% to $6.8 billion during the period.

Specifically, NBC was up 3% -- now with 27% share of advertising dollars -- while CBS grew 2%. NBCUniversal’s Hispanic network Telemundo had the best growth of broadcast networks -- 5%. Heading in the other direction in Q4, Fox declined 12%; Univision was off 6%; and ABC lost 2%.
In cable, ESPN grew 3%; NFL Networks climbed 61%; AMC Networks, added 28%; and Viacom was up 2%.
Although the market was flat in the last three months of the year, 2014 overall witnessed a 6% hike due to digital media such as mobile, video and programmatic revenues. For the year, cable TV spending grew 5.1% to $26.4 billion; digital spending (without search) was up 19.9% to $24.4 billion; and national broadcast climbed 4.1% to $16.5 billion.

SMI notes that without the Olympics, broadcast would have been down by 2% for the full year. In 2013, broadcast only grew 1.5% over 2012.
Looking at specific digital gains in the fourth quarter, programmatic was up 71%; mobile, 17%; display, 12%; search, 12%; and video added 11%· Also, NBC.com was up a big 104% and ESPN 70% in digital ad dollars during the period.

Print witnessed lower results: magazines were down 8% and newspapers dropped 3% in the past quarter.

SMI data come from 80% of total U.S. agency spending exclusively from the booking systems of five of the six global media holding groups, as well as leading independents. It reports monthly on actual spend data.