Beauty Advertising Looks Slow to Recover from the Pandemic

February 26, 2021

Zenith Beauty Ad Spending Forecast Feb2021One extra side-effect of the pandemic and its resulting social distancing, working from home and mask-wearing is a decrease in consumer demand for beauty products. And, as the pandemic continues into 2021, beauty advertising is set for a slow recovery, per recently released data from Zenith.

Based on 11 markets that represent 59% of total global ad spend, Zenith forecasts that beauty and personal luxury ad spend — which includes cosmetics, fragrances, hair care and skincare — will see year-over-year (y-o-y) growth of 1.7% in 2021. This is well below the 4.4% growth rate for total global ad spend expected this year.

Next year does not appear to be much better, with beauty and personal luxury global ad spend estimated to see a lift of 2.6% y-o-y, still below the growth in total ad spend forecast for 2021 (4.5%).

Last year, the share of ad budgets for beauty brands allocated to magazines (18.3%) was reportedly 4.3 times more than for the average brand. And, the 42.2% share invested in TV was 1.6 times higher than the average. In the meantime, with beauty and personal luxury brands being historically slow adopters of digital advertising, they only invested slightly more than one-third (34.1%) of their budgets in the format, while the global market as a whole invested more than half (53%) of total budgets in digital.

Zenith points out that reasons for this reluctance to advertise digitally include a “historic lack of premium digital environments that support the high-quality brand imagery that beauty and personal luxury needs to convey,” as well as the troubles the industry has had adapting to e-commerce, with the need for samples and ability to try on products prior to purchase being prevalent.

However, earlier research has found that more beauty shoppers are heading online to research and purchase products. Also of note, the majority of younger consumers (ages 16-35) report being less adventurous when it comes to buying new brands or products online than they would be in-store, opting instead to buy what they have already tried in the past.

France’s beauty ad market is expected to see the most growth in 2021 and 2022 of all the markets analyzed, with an average growth of 13.3% per year. That climb comes after budgets were cut in the sector by one-third (32.9%) in 2020.

North America (Canada and the US) and other parts of Western Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK) will see much slower recovery, with ad spend growing between 1-2% in 2021 and 2022.

Read more here.

About the Data: Findings are based on an analysis of 11 markets (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and US) that combine for 59% of total global ad spend.

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