• Ad Age, Wednesday, March 8, 2006 10:31 AM

Noting that measured ad spending in network television was down last year for the first time since 2001, Ad Age wonders if this signals a permanent shift or merely represents a one-year anomaly caused by decreased spending by a few top advertisers, most notably the automotive sector.  The trade also took note of an apparent decrease of interest in big-event TV--the Super Bowls, the Olympics, and so forth.  Ad Age: "So is this the beginning of the much ballyhooed end for network TV? Certainly not, said Marv Shapiro, managing director at Veronis. 'Network TV is not going to see things growing as fast as in the past, but it will hold its own because it reaches the masses.'"  Another (more optimistic) way to look at the situation is that TV advertising is not in decline but is merely increasingly at a slower pace.  Irwin Gottlieb, CEO of media-buying operation Group M, offers this take:  “The television market is healthy, but the degree to which money is moving from network into cable has exceeded the rate at which the total pie is growing.”  Brian Wieser, vice president-director of industry-analysis firm Magna Global, told Ad Age, “We’re seeing an absence of growth, which is different than the presence of decline.”  Of the Big Three networks, NBC experienced the most significant decline in ad revenues last year, off $1.17 billion from the year before.

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