Russian ad business bucks the crisis trend

Published: 07 February, 2012, 14:15



Ad spend is expected to show a double digit growth of 16.5 percent in 2012

TAGS: Investment, Russian economy,Infrastructure, Finance



Crisis or not, companies in Russia are splashing out on advertising. Ad spend is expected to show a double digit growth of 16.5 percent in 2012, according to a survey by the UK-based WARC marketing information service.

In 2011 about $10.4bn was spent on adverting in Russia and is expected to reach over $12.2bn by next year. This is a bigger increase than the projected 14% growth in India and 11.5% in China.

The survey shows the crisis hit Euro zone countries at the bottom of the list. Italy is in last place with ad spend barely changing at 0.2% growth, followed by France with 0.8% and Germany with 1%.

Vladimir Evstafiev Vice-President of the Russian Association of Communication Agencies (RACA) says “2011 was very successful and showed the ad market in Russia has been recovering. If the fourth quarter of 2011 hadn’t been poor due to the world crisis the year would have shown a 25% gain”.

Vladimir Evstafiev points out that ad market always reflects the situation in the national economy. In 2010 the Russian consumer market showed growth which was reflected in the growth of the ad market in 2011. The delay is caused by an industry peculiarity, where the entire budget is always planned a year ahead.

There are also a number of important factors, besides a stable economy, that play a crucial role in a young ad market like Russia. They should be taken into consideration when making forecast for the following year, believes Mr. Evstafiev.

One of the most important is so-called ‘media inflation’. “In Russia prices for adverts have always been low and they are increasing every year, trying to catch up with the Western market. For instance, one minute spot in the upcoming Oscar show is worth $2 million, what equals a month’s ad operation revenue on Russian TV. Prices still have space for further growth”, says Vladimir Evstafiev.

It is also very important, points out Mr. Evstafiev that many Western companies before entering the Russian market run a promotional campaign, contributing to Russian ad market growth. In the Far East Russian region Western well known ad companies are joined by ad companies from China and India. “Besides, Russian businessman are contributing to the national ad market, more local ad companies emerge and more people in Russia are eager to invest in the industry”, adds the expert.

If all these factors are positive, according Mr. Evstafiev’s cautious prognosis, in 2012 the Russian market will gain 15% growth, provided there is no stagnation in the national economy, like in 2008. The following year the local ad market dropped 30% in absolute figures

Source:http://rt.com/business/news/russia-spend-leader-2012-613/

The 12 Steps to Resisting Social Media: Or, It's Official -Social Media is Addictive (and more so, than cigarettes and alcohol)

Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds

People are more likely to give in to urge to tweet or check email than other cravings, say US researchers

James Meikleguardian.co.uk, 

Friday 3 February 2012 05.37 EST


Twitter may be harder to resist than alcohol because giving in to the desire seems 'low cost', researchers said. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes andalcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.

A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory.

The results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.

The participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength (up to irresistible), whether it conflicted with other desires and whether they resisted or went along with it. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" reported.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," said Hofmann. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting "pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations".

The researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest "self-control failure rates" were recorded with media. "Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money."

The academics, who included one each from Florida State University and Minnesota University, said the subjective reporting of desire was relatively low for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, apparently challenging "the stereotype of addiction as driven by irresistibly strong desires".

They added: "Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people's identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked."

Hofmann told the Guardian: "Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not 'cost much' to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time.".

Hofmann added: "We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them – they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for."

Würtzburg had been the testing ground because he had worked there as an assistant professor until recently.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/03/twitter-resist-cigarettes-alcohol-study

That's The Job I Want! - A Social-Media Decorder

A Social-Media Decoder
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011    BY DAVID TALBOT

Power shift: Deb Roy, CEO of Bluefin Labs, says social media have changed the relationship between media consumers and producers. Credit: Ian Allen 

New technology deciphers— and empowers—the millions who talk back to their televisions through the Web. 

From his 24th-floor corner office in midtown Manhattan, the veteran CBS research chief David Poltrack can gaze southward down the Avenue of the Americas, its sidewalks teeming. For more than four decades, it has been his job to measure people's television habits, preferences, and reactions. In large part, this has meant following the viewing habits of Nielsen panels of TV viewers and parsing the results of network surveys on their opinions. On a late September afternoon, with fall premieres under way, his desk was strewn with color-coded opinions from 3,000 Americans who had wandered into CBS's Las Vegas research outpost, Television City, at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, and agreed to fill out TV surveys for the chance to win a 3-D home entertainment system.

But now he's also dealing with a growing force: the masses talking back through social media. Of the approximately 300 million public comments made online worldwide every day—about two-thirds of them on Twitter—some 10 million, on average, are related to television (though daily numbers vary quite widely). "¿Que sera two and a half men si[n] Charlie?" one viewer recently tweeted, alluding to the replacement of Charlie Sheen by Ashton Kutcher on the CBS sitcom. "The beginning of Person Of Interest is like Jack&Ben all over again," remarked another. (A couple of weeks later, another added: "I assume CBS will keep going with what's been working for them, and replace Andy Rooney with Ashton Kutcher.") TV executives like Poltrack must now grapple with these spontaneous, messy, irreverent remarks.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38910/