Screen Digest Predicts Yet More Advertising Woe
Screen Digest, one of those media analyst companies that exist solely to make ad salesmen cry, is all set to publish its latest report, and it’s predicting a $2bn fall in US TV advertising. And what with online services like Hulu carrying around a quarter of the ads that the same programming on TV has, internet advertising isn’t going to being making an extra $2bn any time soon.
Spake author Arash Amel to the Financial Times: “Online video is not mature enough and won’t mature quickly enough to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional TV advertising”. But he did say that that gap could be closed within five years if the networks were “aggressive” enough. Does that mean the kind of advertising online that you currently get on US TV, where the light and shade of a primetime drama is erased under the 1000-watt lamps of incessantly yapping “soda” “commercials” every 10 minutes? I’ll start watching Cash In The Celebrity Attic just because I know its not going anywhere.
Screen Digest pissed on another bonfire recently by saying that Blu-Ray isn’t going to make up for diminishing DVD sales – they only made up $482m of the $26.4bn DVD and Blu-Ray sales and rental market last year. While that was a four-fold increase of Blu-Ray sales on the previous year, this curve isn’t going exponentially enough, mostly thanks to people not really noticing the difference between it and DVD, and gearing up for downloading or streaming HD video off the net.
And Screen Digest aren’t predicting big things for in-game advertising either, saying only 1.5% of global ad spend will be on the format in 2014. This seems depressingly small – global sales of the current generation of consoles are now over 100m worldwide, and the most popular games are communal ones like Wii Sports and Guitar Hero. That’s a lot of people, most of them youngish and with a lot of disposable income. Do brands still have the squeamishness towards gaming that the UK government is trying hard to shake off?
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | June 29, 2009 11:03AM |
