Ad spending on television rose 5% in the second quarter, according to new figures from Kantar Media.
The broadcast networks were down 7.2%, while cable networks were up 7.2%. The shift of college basketball championship games from CBS to Turner accounted for the shift of some dollars form broadcast to.cable
The big gainer was Spanish-language TV, which was up 41.5%, boosted by Univision’s coverage of soccer’s World Cup.
Syndication was up 1.1% , while spot TV was down 0.5%.
The second quarter figures left spending on TV , which got a boost in the first quarter from the Olympics, up 7.3% for the year. Early signs from other sources showed that ratings and ad revenue were off to a slow start at best in the third quarter.
“The slow growth rate of ad spending in Q2 is payback for the surfeit of money in Q1 that was pulled forward to fund Olympics budgets,” Jon Swallen, Chief Research Officer at Kantar Media North America said in a statement. . “Our analysis shows that Olympics advertisers reduced their year-over-year Q2 spending by more than 4% while non-Olympics advertisers posted a 2% increase. The latter is more indicative of core ad market performance at the midyear point.”
Overall ad spending in all media was up just 0.7% in the second quarter and up 3.1% for the year.
(Photo via Andrew Magill's Flickr. Image taken on March 18, 2014 and used per Creative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit 3x4 aspect ratio.)
