US advertising spending decreased 4% 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% 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%, spend on TV networks fell 9.2% when compared to the figures of previous year. Minus the impact of last year’s Winter Olympics, network TV ad spend was actually flat year-over-year.
Overall, US ad spend for TV was down by 3%. while, Paid search, which measures text ads on Google and Bing search engines, saw a 7% increase in spending for the quarter. Online display, which measures desktop ads only and excludes video and mobile, declined 8.7%.
The US ad spend report by Kantar Media also shows that Newspaper ad spend was down 15.4 % while magazine spending was down 8.7%.
Procter & Gamble was the largest advertiser for the quarter, spending $570.9m. Still, its ad spend fell 24.5 % compared to last year.
See the top 10 advertisers in US for the first quarter of 2015 below:
- Procter & Gamble – $570.9m: -24.5%
- Comcast – $464.8m: 10.4%
- General Motors – $411.4m: -30.8%
- AT&T – $404.6m: -24.6%
- Pfizer – $400.8m: 13.1%
- Berkshire Hathaway – $367m: 10. 9%
- Verizon – $277m: -25.3%
- Time Warner – $276.6m: 13.5%
- Deutsche Telekom – $269.8M: 34.8%
- L’Oreal – $266.6m: -22%
With the world economy looking bleak with the Economic Crisis in Europe due to the failure of Greece, the trend in US ad spend for the upcoming quarters are expected to be in similar fashion.
