Media Buying Opportunities during the Economic Slowdown

December was the month that television stations and national cable finally responded to the down economy and became aggressive with their rate negotiation. We found that overall, regional rates were down 50% compared to the same month last year and national rates were down 20%.

We witnessed our clients’ CPL drop during the month of December.  We conducted an exercise to learn if the lowering CPL was due to change in consumer behavior or because of lower rates.  We measured the total Gross Impressions of our schedules and compared them to the same month last year and learned that in ‘08 we required twice as many gross impressions to deliver the same number of leads compared to ‘07. The conclusion is that consumer behavior may have improved slightly, but the main driver for declining CPL was lower rates.

Clearance in December was strong, resulting from excess inventory at the station and national cable levels. Direct Response continues to be one of the fastest growing advertising categories during this time. This is a great time to be purchasing media, especially remnant media.

In January and into February we are seeing that regional stations are continuing to be far more aggressive in rate negotiation compared to National Cable networks, making it a great time to be local markets if you want to target your media dollars.

Network Broadcast and syndication are continuing to hold their rates. They continue to benefit from upfront dollars placed in May ‘08 with ironclad contracts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Industry Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.