More bang for your media buck
By Aleksander Nowacki
The global television advertising market's prospects are not rosy, and the situation here could get even worse.
Just a few months ago there were many industry observers who thought that this year might be the beginning of a recovery, but experts now agree that such hopes have to be postponed to 2004.
According to data from publishing house Agora, whose monitoring of the advertising market is regarded as the most reliable in the country, ad spending will fall by no more than 3% and may even remain at last year's level. This is a considerable improvement on 2002, when ad spending dropped by 11%.
However, while Agora anticipates that the current trend of TV stations taking an increasingly large portion of ad revenue will continue, no reliable figures to support this are available from any monitoring agency. Moreover, other industry professionals disagree with Agora's forecast. They argue that the data available for television ad spending is seriously distorted due to discounts that TV stations give their clients, so that no published figures can be believed.
"TV has been taking over some of print media's natural clients, such as supermarkets, because of drastic price cuts, but that policy can no longer be sustained," said Paweł Sawicki of media house Media Direct. "Prices for TV advertising have hit rock bottom."
Włodzimierz Korbel of Mindshare media house concurs and points to other factors that will halt the increase of television's ad market share.
"There is less and less screening time to be sold," he said. "The amount that can be devoted to advertising is limited by law, and 90% of that limit is already taken up." Korbel also expects that the liberalization of restrictions on beer advertising (which is now allowed after 8 p.m.) will contribute to higher rates for TV advertising. Although the new law's full impact will only be felt next year, it may have some influence before then, said Korbel.
Rafał Wiśniewski, managing director of Pan Media Western media house, draws a more complex picture of the market's development.
"It is true that no TV station can afford more price cuts," he said. "But not all clients have equally benefited from the downward trend to date. What we will see this year is that low rates will apply to an increasingly wide range of clients."
However, Wiśniewski expects TV stations to attempt counteraction. New sales strategies and clear criteria for price diversification will be devised, he said, with the express purpose of halting the practice of large discounts from spreading even further.
