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Ad spend suffers $272m but it's all in your outlook

Thu, 18 Mar 2010

A whopping $272 million is gone, gone, goneski from last year’s media advertising spend. It’s down 11.7%, from $2.317 billion to $2.045 billion. And newspapers are the guilty party, accounting for nearly half of the decline with $137 million.

Man, that’s painful. It’s as painful as the time at primary school when you fell asleep in English class and drooled on your 1B5 and then woke up to find your teacher staring down at you and you called her Mum and you had a ruler mark on your face and the whole class laughed at you.

That kind of painful.

Newspapers have a ruler mark on their faces right about now, but interactive is the cool kid who has the Batman lunchbox. (Are Batman lunchboxes still cool? They were the epitome of awesome when I was at primary school.)

Everyone’s keeping upbeat about the carnage though, with the general consensus that it could’ve been worse. (You could’ve drooled on your 3B1. Your precious 3B1!)

It’s all how you spin the news, after all.

The ASA goes for the straight shooting approach, with a brief release on the figures, announcing that ad revenue was over 2 billion dollars in 2009. (Ignore 2008 though, it’s so, well, 2008.)

The IAB brags (and rightly so) that interactive advertising is the only kid with a cool lunchbox. Interactive advertising (or online, if you like) is up from 8.3% to 10.5% or $214 million from $193 million year-on-year. It’s the only category (against others such as TV, outdoor, magazines, newspapers et al) that grew this time around.

It’s also finally breached the 10% threshold. It’s growing but at some point it will reach a plateau. The increase is perhaps a sign more of us catching up with the rest of the world than it is a resilient industry that gets a hall pass from recession. Lucky timing.

If we’re going to follow other countries though, TV should watch out, for one. IAB chairman Michael Gregg makes the point that in the first half of 2009, UK companies spent more money on interactive than on TV for the first time.

That cool kid with the Batman lunchbox has just become the school bully.

The Marketing Association takes a positive outlook, reminding ad folk that while things are stink right now, we’ve experienced significant growth (+23%) over the past 10 years.

We’ve gone from $1485 million in 2000 to $2045 million in 2009.

We’ve also got more people and an explosion of channels, all thrown into the mix. (My point there, not the Marketing Association’s.)

MA head Sue McCarty cautions that it’s important to consider the figures in relation to return on investment and cumulative brand value.

Accountability and measurability are also factors now – spend less and get more. (By the way, you can hop to the MA website for some graphs showing spend by medium, split of spending and share of market by medium.)

Meanwhile, NZPA is taking a “well it could’ve been worse” approach to the bad news, saying it’s “heartening” to see a decline of “only” 9%.

Everyone loves to beat up on newspapers, because they’re the cardigan-wearing kids from the hippie families and they’re never allowed to buy pies from the canteen. But is it really that bad?

I left my crystal ball at home today (ha! As if. I’m fibbing, I carry that bugger around in my handbag at all times) but I can’t help feeling the hue and cry over the impending demise of newspapers as a medium is unwarranted.

It’s a bit like the Kindle. I can’t wait to get my mitts on one of those (it’ll be really fetching in my handbag alongside my crystal ball) but it doesn’t mean I’ll give up on books. It just means I’ll Kindle the books that are available overseas sooner, or the trashy fiction with stupid covers I’m too shamed out to be seen reading on the bus. But when it comes to books I love and will read again and again, it’s gotta be tangible. (Love those orange Penguin covers. Penguins are awesome.)

Similarly, the iPad is also on my hit list. I’d read some Stuff or some NZ Herald on there, but when it comes to the luxury of weekend newspapers, the iPad would stay firmly in the handbag along with the Kindle and the crystal ball. (I’m going to have to get a bigger handbag.)

You can’t really open up the iPad, spread it open on a table at a café and slurp away on your macchiato. For starters, I get awfully nervous when there are liquid items around precious Mac products. It never ends well.

And you can’t use a red pen on your iPad to score through lines of nonsense when the urge strikes. I love to correct spelling mistakes and grammatical nutbucketry while I’m reading the weekend papers.

Moreover, no iPad could possibly give one the sense of satisfaction that comes from doodling on faces of politicians and public figures. I’ll give you the example below of a Paul Henry photo that’s been mastered to perfection. Can’t tell you where it came from or who did it. Secret squirrels. But it really is massively excellent.

We are, in my humble opinion, too quick to condemn the printed word. It’ll wax and wane, but I doubt we’ll ever see the day when newspapers pack up their printing presses and go home to fiddle on their computers instead. People like them too much.

Sure, I’m biased. But there’s nothing quite like the feeling of collecting your 5kg of rainforest from the corner dairy on a Sunday morning, red pen in hand, knowing that your weekly readfest awaits.

Paul Henry: The devil is in the details.

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Ad spend suffers $272m but it's all in your outlook
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