Media Healthcheck: October 2009
At the start of October, a forecast from Carat predicted that UK adspend would fall 12% in 2009.
Globally, adspend was forecast to decline by 9.8% this year, said Carat.
This was almost identical to the 9.9% fall forecast by ZenithOptimedia later in the month.
Focusing on the US, Magna revised its US Media Advertising forecast, predicting that advertising revenues would decline by just 1.3% next year.
It also forecast a 9% drop in US advertising revenue for Q4 2009 compared with the same period last year.
Moving across the pond to the UK, the IPA’s latest Bellwether Report revealed that the rate of decline in UK marketing spend eased sharply in the third quarter.
In some welcome good news, the report revealed that although marketing spend fell for the eighth consecutive quarter, it was the smallest reduction in budgets in over a year.
Also in October, a UK study from comScore showed that social networking sites accounted for 13.8 billion display ad impressions in August 2009, representing more than 25% of all display ads viewed online.
Telecommunications companies, including Telefonica O2, Deutsche Telekom, and British Telecommunications, were the heaviest social networking site advertisers, delivering more than 949 million display ad impressions on social networking sites in August, or approximately 7% of all display ads delivered in the site category.
The central role played by social networks in our online lives was emphasised by Experian Hitwise research which revealed that Facebook now accounts for one in every seven internet page views (14.5%) in the UK.
UK visits to Facebook increased by a substantial 86.1% over the past 12 months and have more than doubled over the last 14 months, said Hitwise.
Facebook also accounts for almost 60% of all social networking traffic in the US, according to Hitwise.