U.S. Advertising Spending Rose 4.2% in 2005.

Advertising spending for the full year 2005 rose 4.2% over the same period last year, due to gains across most major media, according to preliminary figures released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research.

Advertising spending increased in many reported media, led by Internet, Spanish-Language TV and Cable TV. Local and National Consumer Magazine advertising continued to rebound with healthy gains in 2005. Several media, however, showed little or no growth including Network TV, Local Newspapers, and Network Radio. Although Network TV showed positive growth through the first half of 2005, the absence of the Olympics in third quarter resulted in a year-to-year decline. The small increase in Spot TV in the top 100 markets can be attributed to advertising strength in the automotive, retail, and insurance/real estate industries, but particularly the stronger ad sales for Spanish Language stations. Without the Spanish Language TV contribution, Spot TV would have had negative growth for the year.

Advertiser Spending

Advertising for the full year 2005 for the top 10 companies was mixed but reached over $17 billion, up only 0.3% from last year. Although DaimlerChrysler cut back 4.9%, overall the automotive companies showed healthy gains, accounting for $8.2 billion in spending, an increase of 7.9%.

Category Spending

Spending for the 10 largest categories reached over $43 billion throughout 2005, 5.4% greater than the same period prior year. Almost all product categories have increased spending, with the exception of Local Automotive Dealerships, which is slightly down. In fact, a drop in local dealership spending was more than offset by an increase in spending at the automotive factory and dealer association level. The Wireless Telephone industry was the fastest growing in terms of percent increase over prior year.

Product Placement

Top Brands

Nielsen’s Product Placement tracking service continues to show significant growth in the integration of product occurrences in primetime broadcast network programming. The top 10 brands in the product placement category totaled 13,447 occurrences for the full year 2005.

Top Programs

The top 10 programs that featured product placement for 2005 accounted for 31,673 occurrences. As expected, reality programming carried the greatest number of product placement minutes. The Contender was the number one program, with nearly double the number of product placements than the runner up program, The Apprentice, 7,502 and 3,577, respectively.

Prime-time clutter

Based on a 4th quarter 2005 analysis, the average prime-time hour of television contained 15 minutes of non-program content, consisting of national & local commercials, Public Service Announcements (PSA’s) and network promotional announcements. The seven English Language broadcast networks had an average of 15 minutes and 23 seconds of non-program content, followed by English Language Cable with just over 15 minutes. Spanish Language Network & Cable had 14 minutes and 16 seconds. The mix of non-program content varied significantly across the three media: 31% of the non-program content on the Spanish Language networks was dedicated to promotional announcements while cable devoted 17% and broadcast 15% to promos.

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