Car brands continue to lead news genre advertising in 2020: TAM Adex

NEW DELHI: Covid2019 impacted nearly every genre on television apart from news. Unlike other genres, news channels saw a meteoric rise in viewership for a variety of reasons – first, people turned to their choice of news channels to find out about the development at state, national and international levels around the Covid2019 situation; second, they believed it to be the most credible source of information, and third, it was the only genre that could create content and was permitted by the governments to operate. Unlike the GEC genre that completely relies on production and sets, news relies mostly on the on-ground coverage and its reporters.

As per BARC, the genre saw a viewership surge of 298 per cent.

However, during several webinars, industry meetings and discussions, head honchos at news networks clearly mentioned that the surge in viewership did not translate into advertising.

TAM recently released data that showed ad volumes data on news genre grew by 23 per cent in 2020, compared to ad volumes in 2016. Interestingly, the quarter ended 31 December saw the highest number of hours in ad volumes per day.

If we look closely at the data, we will notice an obvious trend where the average ad volumes per day steeply fell in the initial stages of lockdown, and then started picking up early May onwards. The trend was obvious because marketing teams at brands were still unable to gauge the depth of the crisis and not ready to bet money on advertising in that quarter.

News has consistently maintained a 30 per cent average in overall television advertising across the years. (since 2016)

Apart from the top five news genres – Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada, other sub genres also grew.

Services and food & beverages sectors were the leading advertisers on the news genre, however, car brands continued to have the highest ad volumes. The category also led the chart in 2019 also.

HUL and Reckitt Benckiser India were the leading advertisers, while True Shield Hand Sanitiser, Colgate Dental Cream and Policybazaar.com were the leading brands in the genre.

The report also highlighted that regional news channels had more than 70 per cent share of ad volumes. This year regional channels took away 73 per cent of ad volumes whereas national channels had only 27 per cent. The numbers were not very different in 2019.

During the Unlock phase, the genre saw nearly 370 hours of average ad volumes per day, which was 49 per cent more than the lockdown period.