• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 10, 2004

Wrapping up a week in which some of Madison Avenue's leading forecasters upgraded their final outlooks for 2004 - and issued concerns about 2005 - one of the industry's top ad trackers Thursday released a report indicating the pace of ad momentum quickened through the first three quarters of the year. Ad spending rose 8.3 percent across the media tracked by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, a significant increase in the rate of ad expansion from the first half of the year, which was up only 6.0 percent. The third quarter, which experienced incremental ad spending related to the 2004 Summer Olympics, as well as some political campaign advertising, soared 11 percent.

Not surprisingly, national TV outlets have been the fastest growing sectors so far this year. Network TV soared 16.0 percent, while cable networks jumped 13.1 percent and syndication skyrocketed 20.8 percent.

Surprisingly, spot TV was one of the weakest links, rising only 3.4 percent despite the incremental effects of Olympic spending on NBC's affiliates and on the mostly local TV investments of political candidates.

In fact, Monitor-Plus now estimates that U.S. ad spending related to NBC's coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games climbed to $1.8 billion.

But one of the fastest forms of TV-related marketing wasn't advertising at all. It was the burgeoning practices of program product placement. While Nielsen's new product placement tracking service does not provide explicit dollar values to such deals, Nielsen said the top 10 brands more than doubled the number of product plugs compared with the first nine months of 2003.

The top 10 brands generated 8,145 "occurrences" on network TV during the first three quarters of 2004, led by Coca-Cola Classic (2,245 exposures) and Pepsi (1,109).

The top 10 programs that featured product placements accounted for 18,454 brand occurrences. American Idol tops the list, largely due to the program's relationship with Coca-Cola. Other reality programs that feature frequent brand occurrences include The Apprentice, Pepsi Smash, and Big Brother 5.