December shows some recovery signs respect the previous months. Specifically, advertising investments in Italy registered an increase of +3.8% compared to the same month in 2019, bringing up the overall loss of 2020 to -11% compared to 2019. If we exclude Nielsen's estimate on search, social, classified (sponsored ads) and the so-called "Over The Top" (OTT), the performance of the first nine months of 2020 stands at -15.3%.
As for media investments, the two most disadvantaged sectors are the transit and the outdoor sectors, which have suffered (due to travel restrictions) a reduction in investments of -57.1% and -45.7% respectively. Right after we find the magazines sector, in which investments have dropped by -36.6%. On the other hand, the sector that was least affected by the emergency seems to be the online advertising sector (including search, social, classified and OTT), which only recorded a decrease of -2.1%. Worthy of note is that the Web has overcome the TV medium in Italy too.
If we look at commodity investments now, we can see that, in the single month of December, finance/insurance, home management and manufacture/construction/operation show particularly considerable performances, with increases of (+109.2%), (+81.3%) and (+61.8%) respectively. Moreover, we can also see an increase in those sectors that showed a steady increase throughout 2020: distribution (+6.1%) and bodies and institutions (+18.2%). On the contrary, the markets that kept dropping throughout the same period of time are tourism and travel (-56%), free time (-46%), automotive (-25.9%), beverage (-17.2%) and pharmaceutical/healthcare (-13.9%).
2020 was definitely a difficult and atypical year which led communication to evolve similarly. Nonetheless, European predictions for 2021, show a recovery of all that was lost. The first semester will be closely monitored to check If this trend will be confirmed or not.
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