The decline of advertising noted by NYTimes

Tags: Advertising, Marketing

Stuart Elliott today writes about the trend of advertising moving away from the traditional 30-second spot toward more nontraditional forms of advertising and marketing. The numbers presented in this article on advertising spend are remarkably close to the advertising numbers we will be publishing in our "Sizing US Marketing" report on June 1, but our data says that the advertising decline is actually a little more pronounced than reported in the article. Still, the article is pretty clear about the forces we have previously noted behind the decline:

The origins of the industry's current problems are many: the dot-com bust, the fallout from 9/11 and the explosive growth of technologies that help consumers avoid ads - like digital video recorders, iPods and satellite radio. Madison Avenue is still trying to regain its footing. Industry employment, which peaked at 496,500 in 2000, fell 14.4 percent, to 424,900, last year, according to the Labor Department.

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Ad spending in the United States, which once grew reliably year after year, declined in 2001 for the first time in four decades - and by the largest percentage since the Depression year of 1938. While ad spending has rebounded since then, the growth rate is slower than during its heyday of the 1990's.