Audiovisual advertising spend by advertisers

For more than a decade, the audiovisual media advertising market has been affected by profound changes. The fragmentation of the supply in terms of channels, media and screens, regulatory developments and the new expectations of advertisers in the digital age are among the main factors behind this structural phenomenon. Added to this are economic developments such as the economic and financial crisis of 2008, and the economic and health crisis of 2020-2021.

In carrying out this study, Arcom aims to take stock of these developments and gain a better understanding of how advertisers today use television (TV) and radio in their communication strategies. While the two media are often studied separately, the approach taken here was to conduct a simultaneous analysis, comparing the commonalities and specificities of the two advertising markets. The combined analysis of television and radio allows us to go even further, by also presenting the ways in which advertisers use the two media together, and in particular to better understand the synergies that can operate within multi-media advertising agencies.

This first in-depth study, resolutely based on a quantitative approach, is based in particular on the use of advertising tracking data supplied by Kantar. This study deliberately omits the year 2020, which is not representative of advertisers' strategies. The data used in this study are taken from Kantar's tracking data. These data correspond to the public rates of TV and radio advertising agencies (valued on the basis of advertising agency brochures (excluding discounts, rebates and negotiations) and expressed in gross value. The transition from gross to net can therefore vary the orders of magnitude. It should be emphasized that this discount rate (from gross to net) differs in magnitude between television and radio. In 2018, on average, it was around -70% for television, versus -90% for radio.

The study also mostly dismisses the treatment of data relating to digital advertising, which only appears in the hollow of the results presented. The impact of digital on investors' strategies is a central issue and will be the subject of a future Arcom study, since its analysis cannot be carried out on the basis of the same data sources as those used in this study.

This summary presents the main findings of the study, and includes some of its graphic illustrations. The entire document is available on the Arcom website.