GroupM Revises Global Ad Spending Forecast to 5.1% Growth

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Jul 23, 2012) - An uncertain economy in both Europe and the U.S. has led GroupM to project a 5.1 percent increase in 2012 global advertising spending in measured media to $506.3 billion, down from the 6.3 percent hike ($522 billion) forecast late last year.

The revised spending forecast was made in GroupM's biannual worldwide report, "This Year, Next Year," which also said that 2011 advertising spending in measured media hit $482 billion, a 5 percent increase over 2010 spending of $459 billion.

The 70-country forecast also predicted that global ad spending in 2013 will increase 5.3 percent compared to 2012, representing $533.2 billion.

For the U.S. market, the report predicted advertising investment in measured media to grow 3.6 percent in 2012 for a total of $152.5 billion, down from 4 percent growth projected in the previous report, issued in December 2011. For 2013, the new report predicted a 3.1 percent increase, representing a total of $157.2 billion in spending.

"We attribute the decline in U.S. ad spending to a number of factors, including a loss of economic momentum, the global deterioration from all continents but particularly the Eurozone and political and fiscal uncertainty at home for the election and beyond," said GroupM Chief Investment Officer Rino Scanzoni.

Ad investment in the Eurozone periphery (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) fell 6.0 percent in 2011 and is expected to fall a further 8.8 percent in 2012 before stabilizing at par in 2013, according to the report. GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith indicated this prediction "assumes an orderly normalization of the Eurozone."

The study is part of GroupM's media and marketing forecasting series drawn from data supplied by parent company WPP's worldwide resources in advertising, public relations, market research, and specialist communications. It was released today by Scanzoni and Smith, who compiles all of GroupM's TYNY reports.

DIGITAL SPENDING UP
The report predicted that growth in measured digital media investment globally would be stronger than anticipated, increasing an anticipated 18 percent in 2012 to $99 billion, compared to a previous 16 percent forecast. The figure represents a 20 percent share of the 2012 measured ad spend.

For 2013, the report forecast a 22 percent spending hike; Smith said all digital spending trends are positive everywhere irrespective of local economic conditions.

"Internet advertising is growing in every country, so powerful is its structural and evolutionary development," Smith said.

In other media categories, TV accounted for 43 percent of measured global media investment in 2011, a record high. Smith said the figure might represent a peak for TV ad spend because "the continued development of internet advertising, notably video, will now possibly nip at TV's nominal share, though some internet video investment will simply return to different pockets of the same TV vendors."

Print newspapers' share of advertising, meanwhile, hit a new low of 17 percent in 2011, and is expected to drop another percentage point in 2012 and 2013 while Magazines also recorded a new low of 10 percent increase in 2011.

Copies of the full report are available to the media upon request.

ABOUT GROUPM
GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP's media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.