US ad spend falls 4 per cent during first quarter
US advertising spending decreased 4 per cent in the first quarter of 2015 to $37.4bn, according to Kantar Media.
Results have been skewed due to the budgets advertisers pumped into last year’s Sochi Olympics during the first quarter of 2014, which added an additional $600m. Yet when excluding the impact of special events such as the Olympics, core ad spend for the quarter was still down 2 per cent year-over-year.
Jon Swallen, chief research officer at Kantar Media North America, said: “Even after taking into account assumptions about the growth of spend on other unmonitored media, it has been a relatively slow start for the ad market in 2015.”
Out of the 21 individual media types measured by Kantar, 16 of them saw lower ad spending in the first quarter of this year.
While cable spending saw an increase of 4.1 per cent, spend on network TV fell 9.2 per cent compared to one year ago. Minus the impact of last year’s Winter Olympics, network TV ad spend was actually flat year-over-year.
Overall, TV ad spend was down 3 per cent.
Paid search, which measures text ads on Google and Bing search engines, saw a 7 per cent increase in spending for the quarter. Online display, which measures desktop ads only and excludes video and mobile, declined 8.7 per cent.
Newspaper ad spend was down 15.4 per cent while magazine spending was down 8.7 per cent.
Procter & Gamble was the largest advertiser for the quarter, spending $570.9m. Still, its ad spend fell 24.5 per cent compared to last year.
See the top 10 advertisers for the first quarter of 2015 below:
1. Procter & Gamble - $570.9m: -24.5 per cent
2. Comcast - $464.8m: 10.4 per cent
3. General Motors - $411.4m: -30.8 per cent
4. AT&T - $404.6m: -24.6 per cent
5. Pfizer - $400.8m: 13.1 per cent
6. Berkshire Hathaway - $367m: 10. 9 per cent
7. Verizon - $277m: -25.3 per cent
8. Time Warner - $276.6m: 13.5 per cent
9. Deutsche Telekom - $269.8M: 34.8 per cent
10. L'Oreal - $266.6m: -22 per cent