Pivotal's Wieser Offers Tepid Ad Outlook, Sees Upside For Digital, Cable Nets
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, April 26, 2013
Just as advertisers and agencies -- and television networks -- are starting to formulate budgets and projections for this year’s upfront marketplace, an influential Wall Street analyst has
updated his outlook for 2013, calling for relatively tepid growth in the overall advertising economy.
“We expect advertising to grow by 1.2% again during 2013,
improving towards a 3.2% growth rate during 2014,” the analyst, Pivotal Research Group’s Brian Wieser, writes in an equity research report sent to investors and the media this
morning.
The good news for upfront sellers is Wieser projects some upside momentum for the 2013-14 broadcast year that the upfront is based on.
And while he does predict that digital will continue to outpace analog media this year (rising 13% over 2012), he also sees national TV expanding slightly faster than the overall advertising
marketplace (+3% over 2012).
“Cable will probably gain share of national TV budgets at a slightly faster pace in 2013 than occurred last year,” he writes,
adding, “On this basis, we forecast cable advertising growing by 5%, with broadcast networks down by 2% for all of 2013.”
Wieser predicts the growth is
coming mainly from “the creation of new brands who seek to differentiate themselves through awareness of differentiation vs. competitors against the broadest-possible audiences,” and cites
potential emerging categories such as healthcare insurance, as well as the dynamic nature of the consumer electronics industry, which continues to spawn new products and services that “benefit
from the use of TV.”
“At the same time, as we note above, these same advertisers can and will allocate significant shares of their budgets to digital
advertising, as this has become the dominant ‘engagement’ medium for most advertisers, effectively replacing the role that print-based advertising served for so many years.”
