Print advertising defies global trend and registers growth

Mumbai: The much awaited Pitch – Madison Advertising Report 2020 was recently released at an event in Mumbai amongst a high profile audience consisting of Manoj Kohli, Country Head, SoftBank India, Vivek Sunder, COO, Swiggy, Sanjay Behl, CEO – Lifestyle Business, Raymond, Avinash Pandey, CEO, ABP News, Bhaskar Sharma, CEO, Red Bull, Parag Desai, Executive Director, Wagh Bakri Tea, K N Shanthkumar, Executive Director, Deccan Herald Group, Anuj Poddar, CEO, Bajaj Electricals, Aditya Swamy, Director Agency Partnerships and Creative Services, Google India, Nitin Bawankule, Head Ad Sales, Star and Disney India, Rohit Malkani, CMO, Crompton, Prathyusha Agarwal, CMO, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, Karthi Marshan, CMO, Kotak Mahindra Group, Sumit Mathur, CMO, Kellogg’s India,   Swapneel Naidu, Senior VP, Glenmark, and other eminent people from the marketing and media world.

As is well known the volume of Print Advertising in all major markets in the world is declining and this trend has now been seen over the last many years. However, Print Media in India is a different story. Print Advertising has shown tremendous resilience, and not only has it maintained its volume and value, but has infact increased it. According to Pitch Madison Report in 2019 Print Advertising grew by a further 3% and crossed the Rs. 20,000 crore figure. India is also the only major market where Print has a dominant share even today of 30%, with total Advertising market estimated by Pitch Madison Report at Rs. 67,603 crore.

FMCG, Auto, Education, Real Estate and Retail are the main categories that contributed almost 50% to Adex in 2019. Ecommerce is fast emerging as an important category for Print and grew 14%, over 2018. Political Parties are estimated to have contributed Rs. 200 crore account of Lok Sabha Elections.

Nearly 65% of Print’s growth of Rs. 588 crore is accounted for by 4 categories – Education, Ecommerce, Real Estate and Retail.

English language contributes 25% to Print Advertising.

Print continues to draw its strength from its large diversified category portfolio and has as many as 2,00,000 Advertisers, compared to TV which has only around 12,500 Advertisers. It takes as many as 12 categories to contribute more than 70% to Print, compared to only 4 categories to contribute the same number to TV Advertising.

Forecast
The Pitch Madison Advertising Report Forecasts a growth of 10% in 2020 guided by the expectation that the economy should bounce back in 2nd half of 2020. The report therefore forecasts a subdued first half for advertising spend, but a buoyant 2nd half, specially quarter 4. The Report also forecasts that Print in India will continue to buck the global trend and further grow in India by 2% in 2020.

Says Mr. Sam Balsara, Chairman, Madison World, “I believe Adex will grow dramatically over the next 5 years given that we are one of the larger growing economies of the world and already growing at twice the rate of global Adex (11% vs 5.4%). Despite this India’s contribution to global Adex is under 2%, which is bound to go up. Advertisers need to experiment more with media and do things differently to harness the power of media for Brands.”