Malaysia’s adex gathers momentum in February

PETALING JAYA: The country's media advertising expenditure (adex) gained momentum last month, but the Jan-Feb adex still ended up with a contraction against the same period last year.

According to information and measurement company Nielsen Malaysia, advertisers spent RM1.414bil on media space/airtime in the first two months of 2012, down 1.7% from a year earlier.

However, media specialists IPG Mediabrands and GroupM expect spending level to improve in the coming months.


IPG Mediabrands president (Asia world markets) Prashant Kumar told StarBiz: “I see things getting better. The coming months should put to rest any pessimism on the figures.”

GroupM Malaysia chief executive officer Girish Menon concurs.

“Yes, we are slowly seeing the adex getting back on track,” he said in an email reply.

“The timing of Chinese New Year and other holidays in Jan/Feb really slowed down the finalisation of marketing plans at the start of the year. We will start seeing some year-on-year (y-o-y) growth again from April onwards.”

However, Menon cautioned against expecting a growth rate similar to last year. Nielsen data showed that adex jumped by 11.9% in 2011.

“Particularly on TV, most clients are holding their spending at last year's levels, so we don't expect to see any growth there,” he added.

January had seen adex shrink by 5.7% y-o-y, the first monthly contraction in three years.

Ad spending began to grow again in February. Advertisers forked out RM640.9mil, which was 3.4% higher than in the same month last year.

Free-to-air television continued to struggle last month. It posted the biggest slide in ad revenue among all Nielsen-monitored media in the Jan-Feb period (see table).

Internet was the top gainer year-to-date, attracting 46% more adex than a year earlier. (Note that Nielsen Malaysia only monitors advertising spending on selected websites.)

Asked whether Internet spending would continue to grow strongly for the rest of the year, Prashant said he would not be surprised.

“As per our estimates it has been growing at similar rates for the last two years. However, Nielsen's coverage on digital spending has been severely limited in the past.

“We are at an inflexion point when it comes to digital spending and I see exponential growth this year and for several years to come,” he said.

Meanwhile, Menon said that based on GroupM's estimates, Internet advertising had been growing at about 38% to 40% in both 2010 and 2011.

“Prior to that, it was growing at above 50%, but the base was smaller then, of course. For 2012, we are once again predicting about 40% y-o-y increase,” he said.

For the first two months of this year, the top five advertisers were Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Canon Marketing, Glaxo SmithKline and L'Oreal.

The product/service categories with the highest ad spending were local government institutions, women's facial care, photography, mobile line services, and fast-food outlets.