Ad Spending Confidence Rebounds, Improves For Most Major Media

by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, July 17, 2009

Economic pessimism among marketers and agency media buyers appears to have bottomed out last spring and their ad spending plans are trending upward for most major media, according to the most recent data from an every-other-monthly tracking report surveying the "advertising confidence" of key media decision-makers. The latest Advertiser Optimism Report, being released this week by Advertiser Perceptions Inc., shows plans are improving for every medium except for local newspapers, and that digital media such as online and mobile advertising are indexing well on the optimistic side of advertising spending plans.

Cable TV and outdoor media also are improving and now have more media decision makers planning to boost their budgets than to decrease them over the next six months, and while broadcast TV, radio, magazines and national newspapers all are still negative on balance, they are also all improving from low confidence points earlier this year.

"Leading the way are marketers, who are more optimistic than their agencies," says Ken Pearl, a partner in API, which began tracking ad spending confidence levels bi-monthly this year following news of the U.S. economic recession last fall. API historically conducts big semi-annual surveys tracking the perceptions of advertisers and agency media buyers about the major media, including their confidence levels, but opted to conduct the confidence tracking more frequently this year to monitor an inflection point in the advertising economy.

That appeared to be the case in API's last optimism survey, conducted last spring, which showed little or no erosion from a survey conducted in February. At that point, Pearl surmised that advertising "pessimism" had "bottomed out," but said further tracking would be necessary before concluding that advertising economy was staging a turnaround.

The most recent survey, which is based on the responses of more than 200 media decision makers over the past several weeks, indicates that their plans for most major media are once again ascending, especially among marketers who seem slightly more optimistic than their agency counterparts.

Ad Optimism Is Improving For Most Media, High For Mobile/Online

	"Optimism"	Status	Trend
Mobile	57	Optimistic	Improving
Online	53	Optimistic	Improving
Cable TV	17	Optimistic	Improving
Outdoor	12	Optimistic	Improving
Broadcast TV	-7	Pessimistic	Improving
Radio	-12	Pessimistic	Improving
Magazines	-17	Pessimistic	Improving
National Newspapers	-36	Pessimistic	Improving
Local Newspapers	-47	Pessimistic	Declining

Source: Advertiser Perceptions Inc. "Optimism" is defined by the number of percentage points separating the percentages of respondents citing plans to increase or decrease their advertising budgets in each medium over the next six months. Trends are based over three bi-monthly tracking reports conducted so far this year.

ad buys, ad spending, agency, research

2 comments about "Ad Spending Confidence Rebounds, Improves For Most Major Media".

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Ed Macmillan from Allen Press, July 17, 2009 at 9:55 a.m.
Being in Media ad sales it is good to see a positive trend at last. This generally means that business is starting to move past the current recession. Since the Fall is buying season it would be nice to hear something other than "no budget". It would be good to see more articles like this.
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Brent Walker from Soundscapes, July 17, 2009 at 11:14 a.m.

It's imperative that we begin to shake up the way we think about traditional media. It's a fallacy that each medium is an island unto itself. We must move into a new phase of using all the media we have available to us in concert with one another.

For example, one great way to move massive numbers of people to your website or blog is to make that the goal of a radio campaign. It's cheap and targetable, and if driving listeners to a landing page is the goal, it's measurable.

Once we see a few success stories built around the natural media synergy derived from this way of thinking, "traditional media" numbers will begin to rebound. Until then, we're wasting some great resources.