“A genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is 500 years away easier than he can a thing that’s only 500 seconds off.” –– Mark Twain As famed U.S. baseball legend and street-wise philosopher, Yogi Berra once remarked, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Indeed, ZenithOptimedia, one of the world’s largest advertising services groups with 195 offices in 70 countries, predicted zero ad growth in 2009. Similarly, competing London-based GroupM, part of the giant WPP Advertising Group, predicted that global advertising would fall by 0.2 percent in 2009. What a difference from a few years back when no CEO would be happy with future growth of less than double-digit figures. On the other hand, New York Citybased private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson set the 2007-2010 compound annual growth at a respectable 3.8 percent for U.S. broadcast television and 5.2 percent for entertainment media. Reading headlines like these can make you wish you had chosen an easier path in life — as a Middle East peace envoy, for example. But in our world, results count and right now it can be difficult to know where to look for them. Here are just a few suggestions we at VideoAge hope will prove useful and which might even elicit smiles on the Croisette. For one thing, the ZenithOptimedia report, while predicting that advertising in North America and Western Europe will decline by 5.7 percent and one percent respectively, also sees “Asia Pacific and Central and Eastern Europe growing, albeit at a slower rate than previously predicted, and growth remaining healthy in Latin America and the rest of the world.” The health of the Latin American market is underlined by predictions from GroupM, that the advertising market in Latin America is expected to see growth of 9.9 percent in 2008 (when final figures are in) and 8.1 percent in 2009 compared with 0.6 percent and -3.2 percent respectively for the U.S., -0.7 percent and -1.7 percent for Western Europe and a worldwide average growth in 2008 of 2.6 percent and -0.2 percent in 2009. Encouragingly, the ZenithOptimedia report also predicted that television advertising would hold steady in terms of the U.S. dollar, rising from $184,487 million in 2008 to $207,886 million by 2011. A modest gain for a three-year period perhaps, but still a gain, and a better performance than some doomsayers would have you expect. And the report sees television’s share of global advertising holding steady — 38 percent in 2008 and 38.5 percent in 2011 — which would represent the highest share the medium has ever achieved. ZenithOptimedia said that this would happen in part because “advertisers will continue to shift the expenditure from secondary media to television, being familiar with its power to build brands.” This is a point echoed by Marcel Fenez, partner, Global Entertainment and Media Practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), although with one important caveat. “ In terms of Internet advertising,” he asserted, “This recession will differ from the last one in one significant way. At the time of the last recession,” continued Fenez, “the Internet was very new, and new marginal outlets are the first and easiest to cut when times get tough. This time however, there are a number of markets with significant broadband penetration and an established Internet advertising business, and here the Internet will hold up and even outperform other media.” That in some areas this might be the case is underlined by a report from Stamford, Connecticut-based research house Gartner which said that “protail” video has grown 600 percent in the past year alone and goes on to predict that advertising around the form will “reach in excess of $1.5 billion by 2012.” By way of explanation, protail is defined by Gartner as, “that segment between professionally produced content and user-generated content,” and the report went on to urge that “experienced video producers should hire, or work with, savvy Web 2.0 marketers to take advantage of complex distribution opportunities.” ZenithOptimedia has also predicted Internet advertising growth in ’09 of 18 percent in the U.S. and 12 percent in Europe. And, as this Gartner report emphasized, since both television and the Internet are essentially audiovisual media, it should be possible for people with skills acquired in television to take advantage of these healthy growth rates. But some have their reservations about this. Greg Phillips, president of U.K.-based Fireworks International, acknowledged that, “one has to recognize that the Internet is a growth area, and that has certainly been true for us since we appointed Jonathan Ford as senior vice president, Digital Acquisitions and Sales, a year ago. But,” he went on, “if I am honest, what concerns me is the extent to which this is really new money. If this is being earned off the back of audiences that have simply migrated from elsewhere, then the audiovisual pot as a whole hasn’t gotten bigger, all that has happened is that it has changed its nature.” Other potential bright spots are companies with libraries. After all, the recession will not eliminate schedules, and the cheapest way to fill them is to purchase programming rather than making it yourself. And this is something Phillips felt bullish about. “I would expect broadcasters to trim budgets,” he predicted, and, as he pointed out, “the cheapest way to do that is to cut back on original production and buy a bit more.” While agreeing both that, “there is no denying that local production is more popular,” and that, “the cost differential has been narrowing of late,” Phillips still believed, “there will be finance departments all over the world asking budgetary questions that are likely to lead to a reduction in local production, and an increase in acquisitions.” PwC’s Fenez, who is based in Hong Kong, also stressed that “we always thought that 2009 would fall off from 2008, recession or no recession, because we have lost the impact of the Beijing Olympics, but 2010 has a number of advertising drivers for the region, including The China Expo in Shanghai, the 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou V I D E O • A G E MA R C H/ AP R I L 2 0 0 8 18 F u t u r e T e n s e Assessing the Future Can Be Easier Than Explaining the Past PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Marcel Fenez and the FIFA World Cup. So, while the first half of 2009 will be horrible, 2010 should be a lot better and we might even start to see the first signs of this towards the end of ’09.” But, the big question of this whole exercise remains the track record, or the accuracy, of those predictions which in the past, in the case of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, tended to be off by only a few decimal percentage points. So, while this is an undeniably tough period, and in reality is likely to remain so for most if not all of this year, and it is definitely too early to break out the champagne, maybe, just maybe, the time is not too far off when it will be okay to put it on ice in readiness. As American writer Dale Carnegie, once said: “Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” BJ But, the big question of this whole exercise remains the track record, or the accuracy, of those predictions which in the past tended to be off by only a few decimal percentage points.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTI4OTA5