The face of print advertising in India has been witnessing a dramatic change in the past few years. Newer, emerging product categories are substituting the categories that previously dominated Newspaper advertising. One such product category is TV Channel Promotions which has shot up into the Top 5 big spenders in Print Advertising in 2001! TAM ADEX analysed this stunning rise for Channel and Program promotions spending over the past few years!
Consider this… if you were looking at which product categories were dominating print advertising in the last decade you would find names like - Television Manufacturers, Refrigerators, Two-Wheelers, Suitings, Banks and Airlines. That list stands completely changed! The chart below shows that 3 out of the Top 5 print categories in 1994 have
slipped and been substituted in 2001! TV Manufacturers, Refrigerators and Suitings have made way for Cars/Jeeps, Computer Education and TV Channel Promotions!
TV Channel Promotions as a category had been growing at break-neck speed till the September-11 developments forced channels and networks to relook at their print promotion budgets (See Chart 2). The overall press spends were valued last year at almost Rs. 1350 Million last year! Even if you were to take out channels like ETV and Aaj Tak which are promoted through house-ads in Eenadu and India Today respectively and take spends for others at market rates, the category still looks at about Rs.1000 Mn (100 Crore)!
The category expenditure is dominated by a few large advertisers. For instance, the Top 5 advertisers in 2001 (including Zee, Star, Sony) accounted for a whopping 70% of category spends! Similarly a few large publication groups attract most of the revenues. The Top 5 Publications Groups in this category attracted almost 60% of category spends as shown in chart below.
What remains to be seen is that with all the action that is hotting up again with the channels, will this category grow even further? While there are some new channels that will be launched in the next 4-5 months that will propel certain growth so will the TAM panel expansion whereby newer markets will now need to be targeted by channels. It will be interesting to see which publication houses are able to capitalise on the opportunities presented and which ones lose out!
Atul Phadnis, director, S-Group, TAM Media Research
[All views expressed are his own. All numbers are display revenues for print- courtesy TAM Press ADEX]
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