Mon Mar 16, 2009 — by Glenn Hauman

Nielsen 2008 ad spending numbers

This will portend some of the major changes in media this year-- including the comics, newspapers and magazines you read and the TV and movies you watch.

The Nielsen Company reported today that U.S. advertising for the full year 2008 was down 2.6% compared to the full year 2007. According to preliminary figures from Nielsen, U.S. ad expenditures declined almost $3.7 billion to a total spend of $136.8 billion in 2008.

Newspapers saw the deepest cuts in 2008 with national down 9.6% and local down 10.2%.  Local Sunday supplements were down 11%. Magazines didn't do much better, dropping 7.6% nationally and 3.7% locally. Only two categories are up: Cable TV by 7.8%, and Hispanic Cable TV by 9.6%.

Among the biggest ad spenders, Time Warner cut its spending by 23.7% last year, Chrysler spending was down by 31.2%, Ford down by 28.5%, and GM down by 14.9%. All of them are heavy advertisers on science fiction and action-adventure shows like Heroes.  Motion picture advertising dropped $3.3 billion from $3.75 billion, an -11.4% drop-- and again, very likely to be advertising on genre shows. Only two of the major categories saw increases last year: Direct Response products were up by 9.2% and fast food restaurants were up by 3.8%.

Cable was the highest CPM-based revenue-generating medium with $26.6 billion in sales. Internet advertising, not including paid search, text only, paid fee services, performance-based campaigns, sponsorships, barters, in-stream ("pre-rolls") players, messenger apps, partnership advertising, email campaigns or in-house advertising activity, dropped by 6.4% in 2008-- but with that much excluded, it's a tougher number to calculate.

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