Cautious joy in the advertising market

The Hungarian Advertising Association and its partners organised the Evolution 2015 conference in early March. In 2014 total advertising spending grew to HUF 189.05 billion from the HUF 175.5 billion in 2013. President Zsolt Urbán told the market only has reason for cautious joy, because several special factors contributed to this year’s growth but regulatory changes such as the advertisement tax will have their negative effect felt only from 2015. One of the special factors he mentioned was the 35-percent rise in ad spending by the state. Vice president Péter Hivatal said: ‘The biggest positive change occurred in television and digital spending. Television ads profited from the rise in state spending the most.’ In the digital domain international companies continued their conquest as they realised 48 percent of digital ad spending in Hungary. Krisztián Kovács, president of the Hungarian Association of Electronic Broadcasters highlighted that after five years of decline spending on television ads increased by 10 percent to HUF 50 billion last year. Out of Home co-president Bálint Hantosi revealed that in the OOH segment so-called ‘standard’ tools expanded in terms of both spending, surface size and utilisation rate in 2015. In 2014 print media’s revenue from advertisements was HUF 34.637 billion and they raked in HUF 60.179 billion from newspaper and magazine sales. Online ads brought HUF 5.6 billion for them – according to data from the Hungarian Publishers’ Association (MLE). As for the share of the TOP 5 segments, they had 89 percent of the total revenue – from this daily papers’ share was 35 percent, women’s magazines were at 19 percent, municipality and free papers had 16 percent, economic and political magazines’ share was 10 percent and B2B magazines had an 8.5-percent share. MLE president Tibor Kovács informed that for the second consecutive year print media enterprises’ revenue drop was slowing down. He told that 85.1 percent of Hungarians read some kind of newspaper or magazine. However, the advertisement tax made the market more vulnerable. The Direct and Interactive Marketing Association (DIMSZ) introduced the state of play in their market: the size of the sector had been diminishing in the last few years, but finally 2014 brought a 2-percent market expansion with a HUF 29.5-billion performance. Companies are optimistic about 2015, despite the fact that the cost of database management has surged as of this year. As for the performance of various channels, mobile marketing, e-mail marketing and database management are growing dynamically, and the call centre channel did well too. On the contrary, addressed and unaddressed direct mails seem to be losing ground. Experts say that with the demand for personalised communication growing, the market is about to develop. More and more firms in the sector offer well-targeted, easily measurable and directly effective marketing communication solutions.