ART & COMMERCE

High Fives The five-largest advertising categories (out of the 116 recognized by Competitive Media Reporting) accounted for 35 percent of all national ad spending in 1997’s first quarter, a relatively mild degree of concentration. The picture for individual media, though, can be quite different. Each medium has its own list of top-five spenders: No category-not even autos, the largest overall-is on every medium’s top-five list. Among newspaper advertisers, the top-five categories accounted for two-thirds of all revenue. The business depends on a small number of relatively large client categories for its sustenance. Cable-television networks, on the other hand, garnered only 29 percent of the quarter’s total revenue from their five-largest customer categories. The outdoor medium, where cigarettes are so important, has been under tremendous scrutiny of late, but the industry has done a good job controlling its tobacco habit. Cigarette makers still represent the largest client category, at 15 percent of total volume, where they’ve been for the past couple of years, but several other categories, notably restaurants and travel-related services, have grown to become more than 10 percent each. -Alan Gottesman (westendal pobox.com) is principal of West End Consulting.


THE GOTTESMAN FILE
In Q1, each major medium’s revenue reflects a varying dependence on its top-five ad spending categories.

…….Medium…….Top-five share
…….Newspapers…….66.8%
…….Sunday magazines…….63.6%
…….National newspapers…….59.2%
…….Spot television…….53.4%
…….Outdoor…….52.6%
…….National spot radio…….46.0%
…….Network radio…….43.0%
…….Network television…….40.2%
…….Syndicated television…….38.7%
…….Magazines…….38.2%
…….Cable networks…….28.5%
…….Source: Competitive Media Reporting