The global financial crisis apparently did not put enough holes in local companies’ shoes to prevent them from spending generously on advertising last year, a survey revealed Tuesday.
Only posting a drop in October, ad spending kept rising on a monthly basis from January, with the full-year figure rising 19 percent to Rp 41 trillion from Rp 32 trillion in 2007, according to the senior manager for business development of Nielsen Media Indonesia, Maika Randini.
“Meanwhile, the spot number increased by 9 percent to around 5.3 million from around 4.9 million,” She said. Ad spots are the number of advertisements in the media regardless of size (for print media) or time length (for television).
Nielsen Media conducts its survey by monitoring ads in television, newspapers, magazines and tabloids. Maika said the ensuing global economic crisis pushed spending on advertisements down by 17 percent from over Rp 3.5 trillion in September to Rp 2.6 trillion in October.
However, it then rebounded in the following months as we entered the year-end festive season, reaching Rp 3.5 trillion in November and Rp 3.6 trillion in December. Both figures represented around a 17 percent rise compared to the same months a year earlier.
Still, the figures could have hit much higher levels had the crisis not taken place, says the survey.
Before the crisis, television, magazines, newspapers and tabloids were enjoying a steady rising trend in ad spending.
“Television remained the biggest draw for advertisements,” Maika said, “However, its share declined to 63 percent from 66 percent in 2007.”
Newspaper and magazines, including tabloids, were left far behind with 33 percent and 4 percent shares, respectively.
In term of growth in the medium term, newspapers emerged healthily victorious, rising 109 percent since 2005.
Last year, ad expenditure received by the newspapers rose 29 percent to Rp 13.8 trillion from Rp 10.6 trillion the year before, benefiting from regional elections.
“The political candidates running for local elections last year preferred to use newspapers as their campaign media, thus making them the second newspaper advertising spender after telecommunication companies,” Maika explained.
In total, the government and political organizations spent Rp 2.2 trillion for advertisements last year, roughly doubling from Rp 1.3 trillion in 2007.
By sector, telecommunication firms dominated ad expenditure last year, with nine of the top-ten spenders in that category. Excelcomindo (XL) Pratama, the nation’s third largest cellular phone service provider, tripled its spending to Rp 314 billion. (dis)
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