• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Yesterday

With another TV upfront market set to commence, the early reading projects that for many advertising categories it will be a bifurcated outlook -- in spend and otherwise.

Brian Wieser, media analyst of Madison and Wall, projects that rising categories for total TV will include healthcare, financial services, pharmaceutical, travel, gambling/recreation and retail.

Declining categories are expected to include telecommunications, consumer goods, apparel, restaurants, automotive, and food and beverages.

Specifically, the food and beverages category is estimated to sink 8%. Wieser believes social media and commerce are now more foundational for those brands -- where social media and commerce will get around 28% of those advertisers' media spend.

Financial services is more complex. While total TV will see some steady but small expansion, search is still dominant, and has now grown to comprise 45% of its budget. 

Wieser says brands in the financial services category have a tight, targeted audience -- where a lot depends on timing, more than broad media exposure.

While there are broad trends of media budgets moving to digital/alternative media versus traditional media, he emphasizes that one needs to look deeper -- that the market is “no longer moving in lockstep by channel.”

But it continues to be simple equation in a wide range of brands moving, say, overall in mass to connected TV from live, linear TV platforms.

“CTV budgets continue to cannibalize linear rather than expand the total TV pie and overall spend remains locked into a slowly eroding equilibrium," Wieser says.

In that regard, he expects total TV ad spend -- including CTV -- to drop 2% for the year (excluding political advertising comparisons).

Even then, Wieser offers up some hope overall that some of these categories may continue to survive for some time.

“Television growth isn't dead, but it's highly concentrated,” he says.

So this is all to say that we will keep a deeper focus on things.