Comments
The last week of October saw the highest ever weekly television ad volumes in the past five years at 38.7 million seconds, supported by the festival season and big ticket properties, said Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC).
Between October 24 and October 30 (identified as week 43), ads amounting to 38.7 million seconds were shown across TV channels, the highest weekly ad volumes recorded since 2015 (week 16).
The festival season and big ticket properties have led to this growth, said television ratings agency BARC. The second highest weekly ad volumes were recorded at 37.9 million seconds in week 42, 2020 or October 17 to October 23, and week 43 marks a 2.1 per cent jump from week 42, as per data shared by BARC on Thursday.
The celebratory seasons
The fulcrum of it all is the back-to-back festival season, said Harish Bijoor, brand strategy expert and founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. “Add to it the fact that business sentiment has been in a gloom-mode for far too long. Brands have held back advertising monies waiting for the markets to open up. The festival season fulcrum therefore prises open advertising bucks. The Indian Premier League adds to this celebratory season as well. (It is) all coming together,” he explained.
The IPL and festival season definitely have a role to play, but there are many other factors too, Anuj Kapoor, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, pointed out. “Consuming digital content via mobile phones, tablets and laptops can bring convenience along with digital fatigue, and this leads to consumers’ aversion to ads on digital mediums and we can term this as digital ad fatigue,” he said.
Second, ads on digital mediums are hyper-personalised, which can create consumer aversion to such ads, said Kapoor. “Ads on television can be personalised to an extent and therefore, they do not create too much of a privacy concern (as ads on digital mediums) or are too intrusive (compared to the digital ads and the ones that the consumer has been exposed to all these months of lockdown),” he explained. There is also the factor of new content being back on TV, after it was stalled during the lockdown time, and hence, ads are also back, said Kapoor.
Top advertisers
“Ad volumes are also coming to normal compared to Week 43 2018 (October 20 to October 26, 2018 - which saw the third highest ever weekly ad volumes),” said BARC. Growth in week 43 over this week in 2018 is 5.7 per cent, it said. The top advertisers during week 43 are mostly from the FMCG sector, data on the BARC website showed. Hindustan Unilever Limited, Reckitt Benckiser (India) Ltd, ITC, and Godrej Consumer Products are some of the top advertisers during October 24 to October 30.
However, ad spend does not always lead to consumer spend, cautioned Kapoor. “Therefore, TV ad spend data might be the highest in the past five years, but it would be interesting to see if the sales data also leads to the same gains - otherwise, it’s marketer’s wasted ad spend,” he said.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.