• by Wayne Friedman , August 8, 2014

National TV advertising among the major media companies may not be doing as poorly as first indicated, according to one financial analyst.

Although a number of major TV-centric companies reported lower or weak advertising sales, Brian Wieser, senior research analyst of Pivotal Research Group, says by way of comparison to the overall advertising market, national TV had a decent performance.

Wieser writes: “On our current read, U.S. media owners advertising underlying annual growth (excluding incremental Olympic and political advertising) was around 1% in second-quarter 2014 versus slightly more than 2% in first quarter of 2014.

Pivotal estimates a 2.5% U.S. domestic advertising growth this year.

But TV looks like it outperformed the market overall to date.

“We would note that if national TV grew at 2% as we think it did, it means that the medium continued to gain share of ad spending, rather than lose share as many believe.” Wieser says first-quarter ad revenue was up 3% for national TV.

Breaking this down, when looking at domestic revenues from cable network groups -- AMC Networks, Comcast, Discovery Communications, Walt Disney, 21st Century Fox, Scripps Network Interactive, Time Warner and Viacom -- on average grew by 4.4% in the second quarter; and 4.7% during the first quarter. Broadcast networks had a harder time of it with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC declining around 4% in the second quarter, by his estimates.

Overall, the national TV advertising data needs to be viewed long-term. Wieser says: “While this is indeed a slowdown, when put in context of a full year, where growth rates can easily deviate by several percentage points between the quarters, we don’t see this as particularly meaningful in context of our expectations for the medium.”