According to ACAR estimates, advertisers spent 228.7 billion rubles in 2007

Advertising costs in 2007 reached almost $9 billion, and advertisers spent another $2.4 billion on various marketing services (promotions, direct mail, etc.), the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia (ACAR) announced yesterday. However, ACAR does not take into account a number of items: intermediary commissions, contextual advertising on the Internet, PR costs. Taking them into account, as Kommersant calculated, expenses on promoting goods and services in 2007 exceeded $13.7 billion.

According to AKAR, in 2007 the volume of the advertising market grew by 26%, to 228.7 billion rubles. (about $8.95 billion at the weighted average rate of 25.56 rubles per dollar). True, experts have not been able to make a consolidated decision on all segments for the second year. If, when summing up the results of 2006, they were unable to agree on advertiser spending on radio, this time the Internet was added to this segment. According to AKAR, costs for radio and Internet last year amounted to 15.7 billion rubles. (+26% compared to 2006) and 5.8 billion rubles. (+92%) respectively. The Analytical Center Video International (ACVI) considers these estimates to be overestimated. According to his autumn forecast, spending on these media should have reached only 11.8 billion rubles by the end of the year. and 4.1 billion rubles. respectively

Two media - press and outdoor advertising - showed a smaller increase in advertising budgets last year than the market as a whole, according to ACAR data (see table). In outdoor advertising, the growth in the number of advertising structures has slowed down, explains Andrey Berezkin, general director of the research company ESPAR-Analyst. According to him, if in 2006 the increase was 20%, then in 2007 it was only 10%, and in Moscow the number of structures over the year even decreased by 5%.

Advertising in the press, which showed a 21% increase in the first half of last year, increased by only 16% for the entire year. “This is due to the new law “On Advertising” that came into force in July 2006, which legalized the promotion of alcohol in the press,” says Alexander Efremov, an expert at the press research department of the ACVI. From July 2006 to June 2007, thanks to “alcohol” money, the growth rate of the segment almost doubled (from 12% to 21%). But from the second half of the year, the advertising budgets of alcohol producers were already comparable to their costs in the second half of 2006. In general, alcohol advertising in the press, according to ACVI, more than doubled in 2007, to 1.4 billion rubles.

Costs for marketing services (promotions, advertising materials at points of sale, direct marketing, loyalty programs, etc.) in 2007 increased by 21%, to 25.56 billion rubles. (about $2.4 billion). For the first time last year, manufacturers and distributors of luxury goods began to massively use BTL advertising (promotion in HoReCa networks, organization of special events), notes Progression Group President Irina Vasenina. Their total budgets are already close to $20 million.

When assessing the volume of the advertising market, ACAR names only the amounts that media companies receive directly, and does not take into account commissions to intermediaries, fees from creative agencies and budgets for advertising production. “As a rule, all these expenses amount to up to 10% of the advertising fees of media companies,” notes AKAR vice-president Vladimir Evstafiev. That is, advertisers spent another $895 million in 2007.

Companies also include research and PR costs in their marketing budgets. According to the Association of Market and Public Opinion Researchers, last year research costs increased by 30%, to $260 million (see Kommersant on January 19). According to the Sokur and Partners agency, the volume of the Russian PR market reached $550-600 million in 2007. According to one of the founders of the Association of Public Relations Consulting Companies, Sergei Trofimenko, this is an extremely conservative estimate: people spend on PR in Russia already up to $1 billion.

Finally, ACAR does not take into account the costs of contextual advertising on the Internet (commercial links when asked in a search engine). In 2007, its volume doubled, reaching $225 million, iContext agency is convinced. The valuation of the MindShare Interaction company is about $247 million. Thus, ACAR does not include about $2.4 billion in its calculations. Taking this into account, at least $13.7 billion was spent on marketing communications in Russia in 2007.

Sergey Kommersant-Sobolev

The advertising market has grown by a quarter