Spain's broadcasters raising advertising prices

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Spain's broadcasters raising advertising prices     
Written by Iñaki Ferreras  
Thursday, 07 January 2010 20:36

With Spain's national public broadcaster TVE no longer accepting advertising, the rest of the country’s broadcasters are strategically planning to lift their advertising rates.

In the middle of the current economic crisis, the different TV channels will profit from the new scenario both with a bigger advertising pie and from the mergers of private TV channels Sogecable's Cuatro-Mediaset's Telecinco and Grupo Planeta's Antena 3-Mediapro's la Sexta. Experts say advertising prices will be raised 20% to 25%, particularly in the second half of the year.

Another aspect changing with the new panorama is the negotiation of prices. While last year the negotiations were made on a monthly basis according to what advertisers asked for, that control will likely switch to the broadcasters.

Regional TV Channels’ Federation (FORTA) has increased its advertising prices 20% for this month (although these prices remain inferior to those of the private broadcasters). However, this may be seen as a levelling-off of the decreased advertising prices due to the crisis.

Before the announcement of the merger between Cuatro-Telecinco and Antena 3-laSexta - still on the negotiating table - the average price of TV advertisements went down 20%.

From the Telecinco-Cuatro merger point of view Publiespaña - the company managing advertising sales for Telecinco - will also manage those advertisements put on Cuatro. It is expected something similar will happen with Antena 3 and laSexta when those channels merge in the coming months.

On the advertisers’ side, they will be able to better select the channels they will advertise on. Some market experts forecast that all Spain's existing TV channels and the coming ones after analogue switch-off in April will have to accept the price fixed by the duopoly of Antena 3 and Telecinco or else the advertisers will end up marrying to one of these two groups.

But the final move could be that the advertisers will carry part of their advertising TV expenses to other media such as the internet which is the only media that grew ad revenues last year in comparison to the traditional media.

© Rapid TV News 2010