U.S. Advertising Spending Rose 6.3% In 2004.

Advertising spending for the full year 2004 rose 6.3% over the same period last year, due to gains across major media, according to preliminary figures released today by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research.

“Ad spending was effectively spread evenly across the year, with the strongest quarter being the third, helped by additional spending from the Summer Olympics and Political Advertising”, said Jeff King, managing director of Nielsen Monitor-Plus. “The Summer Olympics, with total spending reaching over $1.8 billion, contributed to much of Network and Cable’s increase. After several years of slow growth, Syndicated TV advertising rose 13.7%.

Automotive advertising experienced the largest dollar increase, with the Prescription Drug and Credit Card Services categories following. These three categories contributed to an overall increase of $2 billion compared to same period last year.”

Advertising spending increased in almost all reported media, led by television and print.

Advertiser Spending

Year-to-date advertising spending for the top 10 companies grew to $16.6 billion, up 11.1% from last year. Nearly every advertiser experienced growth, with P&G leading in terms of dollars, and the Big Three automotive companies also showing great increases in advertising expenditures: DaimlerChrysler (+34.6%), General Motors (+19.2%), Ford Motor Co. (+18%).

The auto advertisers increased budgets for many of their vans and SUVs including: Chrysler Town & Country, Dodge Grand Caravan, Dodge Durango, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Lincoln Navigator, Chevrolet Equinox, Cadillac SRX, GM Envoy, and Saturn Vue. Johnson & Johnson, increased spending for brands like One Touch Ultra In-Home Diabetes Test (+$20.6 million), Splenda Artificial Sweetener (+$19.9 million), and introduced the drug Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo (with $90.7 million in spending).

Category Spending

Spending for the 10 largest categories reached $39.3 billion for the first three quarters, 6.7% greater than the same period last year. Combined spending for the three Automotive categories (Factory, Local Dealerships, Dealer Associations) was $17.8 billion, for a net increase of $683 million (4%). The Credit Card Services category, which is the fastest growing in terms of percent increase (32.4%), continues to increase ad spending, exceeding $1.7 billion dollars.

Product Placement

Our Product Placement tracking service noted continued growth in the integration of product occurrences in primetime network programming, with the Top 10 brands in the product placement category totaling 9,334 occurrences last year. The top 10 programs that featured product placements accounted for 23,526 brand occurrences. The number one brand, Coca-Cola Classic, was seen mainly on American Idol, and NetZero enjoyed many occurrences on Fear Factor. On the other hand, Nike and Ford were well represented on many different programs.

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