Online grows faster than TV in China

Beijing - TV continued to dominate the Chinese ad market in 2007, but new media has recorded the strongest growth, reaching RMB9.4 billion in 2007.

Latest figures from Nielsen revealed total ad spend for TV, newspapers and magazines has increased 15% year-on-year at RMB441.5 billion with TV taking 82% followed by newspapers and magazines.

CTR market research, a joint venture between China International TV and TNS, said ad spend had slowed from 22% in 2004, 18% in 2005 and 2006 to 9% in 2007.

Tian Tao, VP for CTR, said the 9% rate is considered a historical slowdown compared with the country's GDP growth of 11.4%.

He explained that the shrinking ad spend were due to several factors such as marketers reserving money for the Beijing Olympics, weak spending from major industries, particularly pharmaceuticals, and advertising spend on new media.

Online, Nielsen recorded more than 3,000 advertisers largely from multi-national and top 500 enterprises in 2007 with automobile, IT, electronics and FMCG sectors driving overall growth.

"Compared to the traditional media, there is huge room for growth with the potential for small and medium size advertisers to beef up their advertising efforts online," Sail Ma, research analytic director at Nielsen Online China and Southeast Asia, said.

Mazda, Toyota and Lenovo topped the list for online advertising with China Mobile and Mengniu among the Chinese brands that made it into top 10.

The upcoming Olympics also see sports marketing become one of the most effective marketing strategies where adspend for the 32 partners and sponsors has shown a 23% growth at RMB18.7billion.

The top three advertisers among the partners and sponsors in 2007 were China Mobile, McDonald's and Coca Cola.