OOH reverts to 2007 figures due to pandemic: PMAR 2021 report

The newly released Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2021 has stated that total Adex de-grew by 20% in 2020 and reached Rs. 54,151 crore, from Rs. 67,603 crore with a drop of a whopping Rs. 13,452 crore. This is the highest drop in one year ever witnessed by the Indian ADEX industry. In fact, Adex is now at 2017 levels, but is expected to reach 2019 level by end of 2021.

Traditional Adex has reduced as much as 29% during the pandemic. Despite this, the share of traditional media is highest with 69%, while the global average is 41%.

The report states that Covid’s negative impact on Indian ADEX has been more severe compared to Global Adex across many other countries, including US, where the drop was only 4%.

Nonetheless, Q4 2020 has registered a whopping 61% increase over Q3 2020 and a 16% increase over Q4 2019. And this gives a lot of confidence and hope that both the market and ADEX are going to bounce back sharply in 2021

As for OOH, it is one of the worst affected mediums, according to the report and has reached the 2007 levels due to a complete lockdown with a degrowth of 63%, falling to Rs. 1,292 crore. With that the OOH’s market share dropped by as many as 3% points from 5% in 2019 to 2% in 2020. However, the report expects OOH Adex to grow by 90%, to reach Rs. 2,450 crore, but it will still be lower compared to the 2014 figures.

Cinema is by far the worst affected medium because Covid and in PMAR’s estimate, suffered an 83% drop, capsizing its low base of around just a little over Rs. 1,000 crore to under Rs 200 crore. Though the medium is expected to grow by 161% to reach Rs. 475 crore.

Commenting on the report, Sam Balsara, Chairman, Madison World says, “A number of macro-economic factors, study of Adex historical behaviour and stupendous growth in Q4 leads us to make a high projection of 26%. Our full report gives you more details of the basis of our projection and some Advice to Advertisers.”

Giving an overview on the advertisers, the report unveiled that FMCG continues to be the main category spender and its share moved up to 38% compared to 33% in full year 2019. Wherein E-commerce and Education are the only two categories that increased spends, by 30% and 9% respectively.

10 new advertisers entered the Top 50 list of advertisers, key ones being Phone Pe, PepsiCo, Facebook and Disney Hotstar.