Media Focus: February advertising month in the black
After a slow start to the year, the figures for February are already significantly more positive. Compared with the previous year, advertising spending in February 2012 rose by about 3.0 percent to 334.7 million francs.
As in the previous month, several vehicle brands were among the most advertised products of the month in February 2012. The BMW 3 Series sedan ranked first, the VW Up! fourth and the Audi A4 Avant eighth. At 6.9 million Swiss francs, the advertising pressure measured for these three new cars was around 21.7 percent of the total "Passenger cars (new)" product segment (31.9 million Swiss francs).
The "Vehicles" sector is also at the top of the sector ranking. With a gross value print of around CHF 38.6 million, it is in first place, closely followed by the "Food" sector (CHF 37.8 million) and "Cosmetics + Toiletries" (CHF 32.2 million).
No less than three of the big TV providers put full advertising pressure on their TV offerings in February 2012, appearing among the top 10 products of the month. In total, Sunrise TV, Swisscom TV and UPC Cablecom Digital TV generated advertising pressure of around CHF 7.1 million. What is interesting here is that these providers chose completely different media strategies to communicate their advertising messages. UPC Cablecom relied almost exclusively on the TV media group (96.7 percent), Sunrise focused - probably not entirely voluntarily, as was gathered from the trade press - on print (73.1 percent), and Swisscom distributed its advertising funds most evenly - comparatively speaking - among TV (40.1 percent), billboard (28.1 percent) and radio (13.0 percent).
Monthly Media Mix
In February 2012, the media mix was distributed across the media types as follows: 52.4 percent print (CHF 175.5 million), 37.5 percent electronic media (CHF 125.5 million) and 10.01 percent outdoor advertising (CHF 33.7 million). Compared with the previous year, the distribution thus shifted in favor of outdoor advertising, which held a share of only 7.4 percent (CHF 24.1 million) in February 2011.
