Highlighting the shift towards digital media, global traditional media ad prices shrunk by 6% in the third quarter of 2020, while online media costs have inflated by just short of 4% in the same period, per a report from ECI Media Management.
With COVID-19 hastening this shift, magazines and newspapers ads saw the largest deflation in pricing in Q3, falling 11.5% and 9.5%, respectively. Radio ad prices dropped by 7.6%, while TV ads had a decrease of 5.1%. Out-of-home, although also experiencing deflation in pricing, was the least affected of the traditional media types, down 2.7%.
The story is different for digital media. The third quarter saw costs for global digital video ads inflate by 4.1% and for digital display by 2.6%. These are also areas where advertisers have increased their budgets since the pandemic.
Regionally, North America saw modest inflation in online media, with offline prices deflating the most of all regions. This is likely due to the 15%+ deflation for newspapers and magazines in the region.
By contrast, APAC’s online media prices inflated by more than twice the rate of other regions, while at the same time offline media prices fell less than in other areas of the world. Indeed, APAC stands out for another reason: it is the only region to see price inflation for out-of-home ads.
In the US, a Q3 update shows that, across the board, offline media prices did not fall quite so much as forecast in Q2. Per the report, offline media is being kept afloat by the upcoming presidential election.
However, the same update shows that online media saw significantly less inflation than first forecast. In fact, the price increases of both digital display and digital video are less than half what was originally forecast.
The full report with data from other countries can be found here.
About the Data: Information on inflation is derived from a number of sources, including ECI’s network of experts, real client data and agencies.
