Advertising spend: Traditional media formats had a tough 2020, and advertisers probably aren't coming back
As well as creating entire industries almost overnight, the impact of the pandemic was arguably more of an accelerant than anything else. For the media industry that meant a really tough year for traditional TV, newspapers, magazines and radio. According to data from the WARC, ad spending on TV was down 16% last year, radio was down 18%, and magazines and newspapers lost more than a quarter of their market.
The L-shaped recovery
The really bad news for those markets is that they aren't expected to bounce back this year. Forecasts for 2021 from the WARC predict that 3 of those formats — TV, magazines & newspapers — will be basically flat this year.
The flip side of the equation is online ad spend. Even in a pandemic year, where budgets are tight and advertising is an easy cost to rein in, spending on digital advertising was up. Ad spend on social media jumped more than 9% and search gained 8%. The advertising boycott of Facebook feels like a very long time ago, as the big tech advertising machine rolls on.
