Media Healthcheck: December 2009
At the start of December, GroupM released a revised forecast for UK adspend, predicting a fall of 12% year on year in 2009.
The revised forecast, forming part of its series of ‘This Year, Next Year‘ reports, also predicted that ad spending in 2010 will be the same as 2009, with another small improvement.
ZenithOptimedia also released a revised ad forecast in December, upgrading its 2010 advertising forecast for the first time in 18 months and predicting a return to normal 5% growth in 2012.
While it estimated that global ad expenditure would drop 10.2% over the course of 2009, it raised its forecasts for growth in 2010 by 0.4 percentage points to 0.9%.
It was Zenith’s first upgrade to 2010 since publishing forecasts in June 2008, just before the full extent of the financial crisis became clear and the advertising downturn began.
In a month which began with a flurry of forecasts, Magna predicted worldwide advertising growth of 6% in 2010.
Magna said that in US Dollar terms, on a global basis media suppliers’ advertising revenues declined by 15% during 2009 as the economy faced near-collapse.
It predicted a rebound for 2010, with advertising growing 6% and on pace to see sustained 5% growth for each year through 2015.
Elsewhere, as the month drew on and the snows closed in, consumers began hitting the internet for their Christmas shopping and comScore revealed just how much people were spending online.
At the start of the month, comScore described a solid beginning to the Christmas shopping season, with UK visits to retail sites up 18% during the first week of November compared to a typical week during the prior two months.
The study found that visits increased even further throughout the month, hitting a 41% growth rate during the week ending 29 November.
Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said: “Right now the UK and France appear to be demonstrating the highest rate of traffic growth to retail sites, outperforming the US by a considerable margin.”
Just a few days before Christmas, US focused figures from comScore revealed that online shopping US focused figures from comScore revealed that online shopping across the pond was continuing to break records.
On Tuesday December 15 consumers spent as much as $913 million online – the first day to break the $900 million threshold.
For the holiday season to December 22, shoppers spent more than $24.8 billion online, a 4% increase on the same period last year.