ADVERTISING
Ad spending down 2.77%
- By: WORANUJ MANEERUNGSEE
- Published: 14/01/2009 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: Business
Last year has turned out to be another unpleasant year of the country's advertising industry, given the 2.77% decline in ad spending, according to Nielsen Media Research.
The industry shrank to 89.4 billion baht last year from 92 billion baht in 2007, marking the first decline in a decade or since the research agency started collecting the data in 1999.
Punnee Chaiyakul, managing director of Ogilvy and Mather Advertising (Thailand), said the outlook of the industry was fine in the first half of last year, with no shortage of good news such as an elected government after the coup and the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing. But bad news crept up in the second half, particularly the closures of two airports, and the confrontation between red- and yellow-clad protesters. On top of that, Thailand had three governments in 2008.
These factors erode consumers' confidence and discouraged advertisers and marketers from spending.
"Anyway, I would say 2008 was not as bad as in 1997 and 1998, when the industry saw a double-digit decline," said Ms Punnee, who is also vice-president of Ogilvy and Mather (Thailand).
According to the research house, all media except radio and transit saw declines last year.
The TV medium, which made up more than a half of total ad expenses, dropped by 4.4% to 51.1 billion baht. A breakdown by station shows that individual broadcasters still reported positive growth and the decline was largely the result of the removal of the commercial TV station iTV in 2008.
The top spenders of last year were Unilever (Thai) Holdings, Procter & Gamble (Thailand), Toyota Motor Thailand, L'Oreal (Thailand), Advance Info Service Plc, Osotspa Co, Beiersdorf (Thailand), PTT Plc, Nestle (Thai) and Colgate-Palmolive (Thailand).
Like many people in advertising industry, Mrs Punnee said 2009 will be tough and the local economy will feel the impact of the global recession.
"As I have said before, cutting ad spending is not the right solution to overcome the hardships. Actually, business operators should think about new business strategies and marketing," she said.
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