• Ad Age , Monday, August 4, 2008 8:58 AM

Procter & Gamble cut its U.S. media sending at a double-digit pace last quarter, and many of its biggest global rivals -- including Unilever, L'Oréal and Johnson & Johnson -- also sliced measured media expenditures, though not nearly as sharply or broadly, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.

Though the TNS database isn't complete for the quarter, those sections that are paint a particularly glum picture of rapidly decelerating spending for P&G throughout the last quarter, particularly for magazines, an area where the company had been rapidly increasing spending in recent years. TV spending appeared to follow a similar pattern, though TNS data are available only through May.

Marketers are grappling with rising commodity costs, big price increases, rising private label sales and consumers who've been spending less. Unilever executives last week described the U.S. market as essentially flat. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the shows the percentage of package-goods players whose North American sales were shrinking as a share of their total rose to 41% in the fourth quarter from only 6% in the first quarter of last year.

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