Carat, the global media agency network owned by London-based Aegis Group, has revised its global ad spending forecasts downwards for 2009 and 2010.
In March, Carat predicted a 5.8% drop in global ad spend from last year’s totals. A statement from the company Thursday said 2009’s decline is now predicted to be 9.8% “due to significant reduction of forecasts in all regions, with the exception of Asia Pacific.”
Next year’s projected growth of 0.7%, however, was raised to a full but “very modest” 1%.
“These significant revisions are not unexpected in the context of the recent volatility of the market,” said Jerry Buhlmann, Aegis CEO, “and represent a cautious attitude towards ad spend this year, most significantly in the U.S. and Europe.”
While projected declines increased across all regions, the biggest adjustments were made for the U.S., Russian and western European markets. The U.S. expected decline is now 16.3%, versus the initial 9.8% prediction in March.
Canada’s expected 2009 decline was adjusted to 2.7% from 2.5%.
Asia is the only region expected to see growth in 2009; Carat actually upgraded its projections to 6.9% growth from 4.6%. The Asian Pacific market is also predicted to see the largest growth in 2010 at 4.6%.
“China remains the most resilient of the major economies, and we have revised our estimate upwards since March… However, even in China, we have noticed advertisers proceeding cautiously, and adjusting spend on a quarterly basis,” Buhlmann said.
When broken down by media, magazines saw the worst of the downgraded expectations. What was originally thought to be only an 8.6% global decline is now expected to be a 17.1% decline.
Even online advertising, which was previously projected to see 6.3% growth this year–and is the only media segment expected to see growth at all–has been downgraded. Carat now predicts only 1% growth on the year. (Carat includes only online display and paid search in calculating online ad spend.)
On Tuesday, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau reported the U.K.’s online advertising now outpaces television advertising in terms of share. For the first six months of 2009, online ads made up 23.5% of the $3 billion market, while television made up only 21.9%.
