RELUCTANT ADVERTISERS RETURNING TO TV

Some advertisers who just months ago had balked at the networks’ price increases for TV ads and had vowed never to pay them have, according to Advertising Age, “reversed course and paid what they said they wouldn’t in select cases.” The trade publication observed that although many of them had planned to pull money out of TV campaigns and allocate it to Internet buys instead, they are now reconsidering that approach. In an interview with AdAge, Rino Scanzoni of WPP’s Group M said, “In online video, if you try to reach the audience you get on national television, it will cost you more” on a per-customer basis. And while television looks positively old-fashioned, “its underlying value has really sustained itself,” he added. The trade publication also cited a recent study by Kantar Media showing that while TV ad spending rose only 1 percent in 2008, then fell 9.5 percent in 2009, it has already increased 10.5 percent during the first quarter of this year.