Media Sales Today

The worst of the recession may be behind us, but the shakeout in the traditional retail industry is expected to last through 2012. Several thousand stores are predicted to close up shop across this country. This change will impact media companies who are competing to capture retailer advertising budgets.

In the world of newspaper circulars, several interested parties must work together to make the format a success: The retailers offering deals, the newspaper publisher that prints and distributes circulars to its readers, and the shoppers who redeem coupons. This system has been working well for decades but that may be about to change. The revenue that newspapers receive from their Sunday inserts could be about to take a big hit.

While nearly one-third of newspaper advertising sales managers say revenues for the first half of 2011 are up over the first half of 2010, they have lowered their projections for the year. These managers are also less optimistic than ad sales managers overall according to a new local ad sales forecast.

  As consumers are increasingly out of their homes, marketers are turning to digital out-of-home advertising as another way to reach them. A new eMarketer study shows big increased ad spending for this emerging channel, and some of those dollars are coming from TV budgets. Media planners who said they would include digital out-of-home in [...]

Just released numbers show that for first quarter 2011 the overall U.S. ad economy grew 4.4 percent. While that is a slower pace than in previous quarters, it’s still good news. See the first quarter numbers by media type.

Since DVRs first entered the market, advertisers feared the end of television advertising with consumers fast forwarding their way through ad after ad. A recent media study shows the DVR may not be the ad-killer the industry feared, but other distractions such as the smartphone are a real threat.

Well, I’ll start with the positives – people ARE absorbing the news, even more than before. It’s just the medium that people are using to get their news that’s changed. Yup, you guessed it – more people get their news online. Big shocker.