Health ministry’s adex jumps by over 600% for Jan-Sept due to dengue and H1N1 campaigns

For the first time in five years, the government has overtaken mobile line services as the top advertiser in the country. From January to September this year, ad spending by local government institutions grew 46.2% to RM224 million, according to Nielsen.

The increase was largely driven by government awareness campaigns on dengue and Influenza A(H1N1), social messages and national service campaigns. The Ministry of Health in particular saw its advertising expenditure for the first nine months jump by 627% to RM68 million, compared to the RM9 million it spent during the same period last year.

As at Oct 19, there were 580 cases of influenza-like illness being treated in hospitals while the number of deaths caused by H1N1 remained at 77.

The ministry also launched awareness campaigns to combat the rise in dengue cases. A total of 21,707 cases were recorded from early this year until May 30.

Other top gainers were the hypermarket and university categories which grew 45.9% and 40.2% respectively. From January to September, hypermarkets spent RM88 million, mostly on price reduction campaigns in response to the government’s call to lower prices during the economic slowdown.

Universities spent RM88 million and moved into the sixth position as top spenders. The increase in ad spend was driven by colleges such as SEGi, Mahsa, UCSI and Inti promoting their recently upgraded status as universities or university colleges.

The fast food category saw an increase of 29.4% as chains like KFC promoted their value meal packages and new product launches. KFC Holdings, which is ranked No 10 in the top advertisers list, launched its Ramadan value meals at under RM10 in September.

Another category that benefited from new product launches is women’s face care which saw ad spend rising 20.7% to RM139 million. Proctor and Gamble, L’Oreal and Unilever were the top three spenders in this category.

Mobile line services providers which are usually the top spender saw ad spend shrinking by about a fifth (22%) to RM212 million. During the same period last year, they splashed on advertising due to the Euro Cup 2008. Celcom, the official sponsor, was the top advertiser last year with an estimated ad spend of RM143 million.

Nonetheless, mobile line services remain a huge contributor to adex with Celcom, DiGi and Maxis retaining their positions in the top 10 although their spending declined by 25%, 31% and 21% respectively.

TM on the other hand bucked the trend and increased ad spend by a hefty 72% between January and September. According to Nielsen, TM’s growth in ad spend was driven by its “Talk & Save” campaigns along with its various home line and broadband campaigns.

Total adex for the period of January to September grew by 3.8% to RM4.7 billion, compared with RM4.5 billion for the same period a year ago.

Newspapers still dominate total ad spend with more than half the share (52.2%) but were among the three mediums that saw their market share decline. Magazines saw the highest contraction at 11.6%, followed by cinema (7.3%) and newspapers (1.9%). Radio’s market share grew by 21.1%, followed by outdoor (18.5%) and point of sale (1.3%).

While the figures showed smaller contractions in adex for certain media, they are unlikely to bring much cheer to advertising practitioners who say that Nielsen figures do not include discounted rates.

In a report in The Edge Financial Daily on Oct 13, a spokeswoman for The Nielsen Company said it had begun the process of collecting discount factors from media owners.

Conversely, there are others who say that Nielsen figures are lower than actual ad spend. On Oct 20, the Magazine Publishers Association (MPA) Malaysia launched its own adex evaluation. MPA said its purpose was to provide the industry with a true picture of magazine adex and to counter the perception that it is on the decline. Nielsen figures for January to September 2009 showed that magazine adex shrunk by 11.6% to RM98.4 million.

MPA said that Nielsen monitors only 36 publications whereas there are 110 titles from 16 publishers in its portfolio.

According to the association, revenue for its magazines from January to September this year totalled RM140 million and the number of ad pages has been on an upward trend since March. Last month, total ad pages increased by 14.4%, it added.

Half the titles under MPA are in Bahasa Malaysia, 42% are in English and 16% in Chinese. Publishers under MPA include Berita Publishing Sdn Bhd, Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd, Blu Inc Media Sdn Bhd, Measat Publications Sdn Bhd and Life Publishers Bhd.



This article appeared on the Media & Advertising page, The Edge Financial Daily, Oct 29, 2009.