A review of Q1 national advertising spend
Feather Brooksbank research manager Fiona Booth takes a look at which product categories spent more, and which didn’t, across the first quarter of this year.
According to latest media expenditure data from Nielsen, total ad spend in the UK across the first quarter of the year, excluding online*, was £2.502 billion. This was up a fairly modest 1.63% when compared to total ad spend for the first quarter of last year.
By product category, Finance was the biggest spender again with advertisers in this sector laying down over £326.9 million across the first three months of 2011. This is up 8.32% on the same period last year.
Following Finance is the Entertainment & Leisure category which saw an increase in media expenditure of 6.92% on Q1 2010 to £205.07 million, leapfrogging from 4th biggest category spend to 2nd. Rounding out the top 3 is the Food category, with ad spend of £198.25 million in this sector, up a pretty flat 0.55% when compared to the same quarter last year.
At the other end of the scale, the Tobacco & Accessories category, already the smallest spending sector by far, continues its fall from grace as it records the biggest drop in ad spend year on year, down 38.99% versus Q1 2010 to only £28,752 in Q1 2011.
However, the real loser this quarter is the Govt, Social, Political Organisations category, but this is hardly surprising following the very highly publicised spending cuts. In Q1 2010 it ranked as the second highest spending product category with £210.93 million, but ad spend in the first three months of this year shows a huge drop of 36.47% year on year, a drop second only to that experienced by the Tobacco & Accessories category, to only £133.99 million. Down to number nine it’s still in the top 10, but for how much longer.
The category that saw the biggest growth year on year was Games and Consoles, up a massive 49.13% to £20.42 million, trying to capture the attention of the more income-squeezed among us who are looking to replace expensive out of home leisure with cheaper activities we can do at home.
* We have not included online spend in this report due to a change in online spend methodology from Jan 2011, the resultant trend break makes online spend data pre 2011 not comparable with data from Jan 2011 onwards.