We’re a long way from the glory days of 2007, when above-the-line advertising in the UK hit a peak of £9.14 billion, according to Nielsen Media Research. But even then, long before the start point of the financial crisis in October 2008, there were signs it couldn’t go on. Unilever was the third-biggest spender in 2007, but even so, its £142m budget for above-the-line had been cut 16% on the previous year.

Vodafone, meanwhile, the 20th biggest spender, had pruned back its spending by 17.5% to £54m. “How advertising spend is apportioned in 2008 will no doubt reveal an interesting tale”, wrote Amanada Nottage in Marketing magazine on 20 February that year. She wasn’t wrong. That issue of Marketing carried a story on the Northern Rock nationalisation, the first major victim of the credit crunch in the UK. What followed was the biggest fall in global ad spending in modern times.

And we’re not out of the woods yet. According to a report published by The Advertising Association/Warc Expenditure Report on 09 February, UK advertising is still currently in decline. It’s predicted to fall by 3.8% in Q1 2010, and 0.8% in Q2, totalling nine successive quarters of decline – more than two years (including an estimated fall of 12.7% in 2009). If you’ve been finding it tough as a photographer, you really shouldn’t take it personally.

There is a ray of hope, however. The report predicts an upturn of 2.8% in Q3. But as Rufus Olins, chief executive of Warc puts it: “Prospects for a return to growth in ad spend later this year are now good. However, as recent UK economic data has shown, the recovery is still fragile.”

Drilling down into the figures makes for interesting reading. For example, not every part of the advertising market has been affected equally badly, or in every part of the world. Nielsen published a report at the start of April on global advertising spend in 2009, and found that companies producing fast-moving consumer goods (such as pharmaceuticals or fast food) had actually increased their spend. Drinks advertising increased 20.2%, for example, and food was up by 11.6%, while ad spend on housekeeping products improved 12.8%, and cosmetics increased a more modest 4%.

What’s more, collective ad spend from these industries accelerated as the year went on – from 0% in Q1 to 21.5% in Q4, a rate that “took even experienced market-watchers by surprise”, reported the Financial Times on 04 April. There’s also good news for ad photographers working in emerging markets such as China and India. Because while advertising in the Asia-Pacific region ramped up by 6.6% (including a 14.9% rise in China), everywhere else in the world continued to nosedive.

Just where the advertising spend is going in terms of the media used also makes for interesting reading – interesting, and worrying, for photographers. Because while ad spend in the Asia-Pacific region went up, it didn’t go up across the board. Television ad spend went up by 10.4% in the region (while it declined by 5.6% and 2.8% in North America and Europe respectively), radio revenues also went up, but newspaper ad revenue remained static and magazine ads declined by 6.4%. In other words, print advertising fell in the one area in the world where advertising went up.

The one media segment for which advertising is really booming, and this will come as no surprise, is the internet. The Internet Advertising Bureau reported that it overtook television to become the UK’s biggest ad medium in 2009, with a record £1.75 billion spent on online ads in the first six months of the year. “This milestone marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century,” wrote Mark Sweney in The Guardian last September. “In a decade the internet has become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.”


Online takeover
According to his article, the internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, and Guy Phillipson, the chief executive of the IAB, was reportedly  confident that the internet would soon take 30% of the total. The UK was the first major economy in which this happened but it’s not alone. On 09 March this year, The Guardian’s Mercedes Bunz reported that online ad spend in the US was also set to overtake print for the first time.

“Information researchers and analysts Outsell surveyed more than 1000 US advertisers last December,” she wrote. “They found that in 2010 companies will spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to seminars on the web, while they plan to invest $111. billion in print such as newspaper and magazine ads.” Meanwhile, she added, print ad spending faced another year of strong decline, with the US weeklies reporting the worst drop ever since their figures were recorded in 1947.

It couldn’t really be any other way given the rising ubiquity of broadband and mobile internet connections. More than one-fifth of UK citizens now has a smart phone that they use to browse the internet, according to Nielsen, and the IAB says the UK had 39.7m active internet users by February.

What does it mean for photographers? Well, as Bunz’s comments suggest, it’s not necessarily all that good for them – most online advertising is not photography based. In fact, it’s not even image based, and the IAB says that one of the few areas that is – online display advertising such as banner ads – is on the decline, with ad spend falling 4.4% between 2008 and 2009 to make up 20% of the total, or £709.3m, in 2009.

But it’s not all bad. After all, if the internet is taking ad spend from TV, it might be a step in the right direction for photographers. And, as Amber Calo, senior manager of creative intelligence at Corbis, points out, changing technology doesn’t have to mean that imagery used for online ads is any less sophisticated than that in print or outdoor ads. “Two years ago we would have said online images needed to be graphic and iconic so that they could work at thumbnail size,” she says. “That’s no longer the case if you think of technology such as the iPad.”

One area of online advertising easily within photographers’ reach is booming in the UK – online video. It saw a year-on-year increase of 140% from 2008 to 2009, a relatively new medium muscling its way onto the market. If the figures are anything to go by, the latest generation of HD-enabled DSLR cameras should pay for themselves many times over.