Nielsen Reveals Full Extent of the Media Industry's First-Half Battering - Advertising Age - MediaWorks

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Nielsen Reveals Full Extent of the Media Industry's First-Half Battering

Execs Eye Better Second Half, Hope to Put 15% Plunge Behind Them

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Nobody ever mistook the first half of this year for a good time, but a Nielsen report last week shed sobering light on just how bad it's been.

U.S. ad spending dropped 15.4% from the first half of 2008, Nielsen said, for the biggest plunge since it company started calculating these figures in 2002. Cable TV rose 1.5%, Spanish language cable eked out a 0.6% gain, and the other 17 measured media sank -- from display advertising on the web, down 1%, to local Sunday supplements in newspapers, down a whopping 45.7%. All that combined to blow a $10.3 billion hole in ad spending.

Of course, the Nielsen report didn't even track the damage to marketing activities beyond 30-second TV spots and ad pages. And it didn't capture the recession's less-quantifiable burdens. Media sellers found themselves asked to do work, for example, that marketers or agencies had once done themselves -- until they laid off the employees who'd done it.

But the numbers at least provided a new way to sum up, and an opportunity to bid farewell to, six months of notably bad times. The only good news is: The second half is looking, thank heaven, like an improvement.

Grim start

The first few months of 2009, when many were terrified of economic freefall, played especially brutally. "The most shocking thing about the first quarter was how advertising that was booked started just cancelling," said Carlos Lamadrid, senior VP-chief brand officer at the Woman's Day Brand Group. "The phones rang ...

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