New data shows that political parties have spent much less on advertising in the traditional media in the past six months to September. The biggest losers, radio and television.
According to an advertising monitoring company, The Nielsen Company, political parties have only started using radio and TV to woo voters at the end of September.
Preliminary data compiled by the company shows that party spending on some print, radio and TV titles declined by about 80% when compared to spending in the 2016 local government elections.
Local print, radio and television media have done well in covering political parties in the past six months, but this has not translated into any significant revenue.
Radio, TV miss out as parties spend less on advertising:
The reason – political parties are now spending less on paid advertising. Contrary, broadcasters are spending millions of rand following political leaders in their election campaigns.
Although hard lockdown has been good for television viewership numbers with more people at home watching TV, that did not do much to persuade many political parties to advertise on television and radio.
MD of The Neilsen Company Terry Murphy says in 2016 political spending amounted to R125 million.
“It’s across the board in 2016 and I am going to quote numbers so in 2016 for the 8 months running into elections we saw roughly R125 million in political spending across all media types – predominantly radio and TV.”
Neilsen says no political radio advert could be detected in the past six months. However, the latest data shows that political parties have recently started advertising on both radio and television from September. But the spending remains very low compared to 2016.
Murphy explains, “What we are seeing in ad spend now is a significant reduction compared to 2016. If you look at this point before elections. Measurement of total spend up until 2 months ago in 2021 compared to 2016 the rate card of ad spend in SA was just over a million rand across all political parties for all traditional media types.”
The Nielsen Company says a conclusive data analysis on this year’s local government will be available after the elections. Murphy says the numbers could change slightly as most political parties tend to increase their spending on advertising in the last few weeks before the elections.
“We could see the measurement come through in the last 2 months of what we measured. To see increased expenditure in September and October, there is little chance that we are going to see the levels come up to what last time. If you look 2 months prior previous year it was R8 million this time it’s R1 million a lot less this time.”
Data shows that print media has enjoyed consistent growth in the past few months, although the value of ad spend is much smaller, as Murphy explains.
“Usually, TV and radio take up about 80% of spend and that’s what happened in the last elections followed by print and out-door and the other media, this time there’s significantly less TV and radio spend, they could be doing other things like programmes and interviews, but right now we see print leading followed by other small media types.”
