Growth in the US ad market here in the US will slow this year due to the credit squeeze and a housing slump, ZenithOptimedia said in its quarterly report yesterday. ZO cut its US growth forecast for 2007 to 2.5% from 3.3%, reflecting the sharp drop in property and construction advertising. But ZO said the whole industry would benefit in 2008 from the Beijing Olympics and predicted the games would help lift TV’s share of the global ad market to a record 38.2% that year.
ZO said TV would increase its share of global ad spending to 38.2% from 37.9% in 2007. Coverage of the Olympics would give an extra boost to television, particularly in China and its neighbors, despite the medium losing market share in many countries in North America and western Europe.
In 2008 ZO expects television’s share of ad expenditure to fall 0.3 percentage points to 32.4% in North America, and 0.5% percentage points to 30.4% in western Europe. The group also again revised upwards its forecast for Internet ad growth to 29.9% this year, from an estimate of 28.6% made three months ago. It expects 85% growth between 2006 and 2009.
Online video and local search are the new, fast-growing segments, but display, classified and the rest of search advertising was still growing rapidly.
ZO expects Internet advertising to account for 9.5% of all expenditure in 2009, fractionally up from the 9.4% ZO forecast three months ago. Newspapers are expected to suffer as a result of the Internet growth, with the medium’s share of world ad expenditure predicted to fall to 26.2% by 2009 from 29% in 2006.
