You can tell a lot about what kind of year 2009 was just by looking at who increased and decreased ad spending the most.
For instance, a company called the National Mortgage Center, which claims to help consumers avoid foreclosures, boosted its ad spend to $17.2 million from about $40,000 in 2008, a 430-fold increase. Money4Gold also logged a big jump in ad spending, as did Freedom Financial Network, a marketer that purports to help consumers manage their debt.
The big decreasers? The entire real estate category and anyone selling mutual funds.
The data, released by the Nielsen Co. this month, connect the dots for a year in which overall U.S. advertising spending fell 9 percent, to $117 billion. But that estimate was actually better than originally predicted. For the first half of 2009, spending was down 15.4 percent over the same period in 2008. Things picked up considerably in the fourth quarter. (Nielsen’s estimates don’t include online ad spending. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, such spending was estimated at $10.9 billion, a 5.3 percent decline from the same period in the previous year. The IAB’s full-year 2009 figures aren’t out yet.)
The softness at the beginning of the year is one reason why there were so many new direct response advertisers like Cash4Gold, said Sam Catanese, chief executive of the Infomercial Monitoring Service of Broomall, Pa. Catanese said that since so many major advertisers pulled back on spending in early 2009, there was a lot of cheap TV airtime. “The first quarter was strong,” Catanese said, referring to 2009. But Catanese added that in each subsequent quarter, rates went up again, and time became scarcer. As for 2010: “Q1 seems to be strong again. I feel we’ll be up and swinging.”
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