A report by Kantar Media said that ad spending in major media in the U.S. in the second quarter rose 2.8 percent from the same period a year ago. While it is the sixth straight quarterly gain since Q4 2009, it was the smallest of those increases.
While total growth for the first half of 2011 is up 3.2 percent, the lack of growth is worrisome to media owners who want to pull out of the recession. A majority of media types, it must be said, did see increases during first half of 2011.
However, the 100 biggest advertisers “stalled” in the second quarter. “The ad market became more dependent on the comparatively smaller budgets of midsized advertisers as the main source of growth,” said Jon Swallen, senior vice president for research at the Kantar Media North America unit of Kantar Media.
Of the seven categories of media tracked in the first half, only two were down from the first half of 2010 and they were both printed media. They were newspapers, down 0.3 percent, and free-standing inserts, mostly distributed through newspapers, down 6.4 percent.
The categories that were up compared to the first six months of 2010 were outdoor at 11.8 percent, followed by Internet media, up 10.4 percent, magazines at 2.9 percent, television up 1.8 percent, and radio up 1.4 percent.
Source: New York Times
