Nielsen Q1 Ad Numbers Paint Picture of Media Industry's Gloom

(MoneyWatch)  Well, folks, Nielsen's tallies of first quarter ad spending are in, and they show the deepest percentage decline since Nielsen started to tabulate this data in 2002. All told, ad spending was down by 12 percent compared to Q1 2008 to $27.9 billion. Ouch.

You probably don't have to guess which medium did the worst -- yes, it was newspapers, which got hit three ways from, well, Sunday. Local Sunday supplements were off by a total of 37.7 percent, national newspapers by 27.7 percent, national Sunday supplements by 25.9 percent and local newspapers by 14.3 percent. The performance of local newspapers practically sounds good relative to the declines in other parts of the newspaper industry; on a percentage basis, local newspapers are on a par with the declines in spot television in the top 100 markets (15.6 percent) and Spanish language TV (13.8 percent.)

Nielsen measures a total of 19 different categories; print media took up seven of the bottom, with national magazines taking a 20.6 percent hit and local magazines taking a 23.6 percent hit. So what declined least? Spanish language TV, with only a 1.1 percent decline, followed by cable TV (2.7 percent) and Internet (3.4 percent). (Nielsen doesn't measure search advertising.) That Internet figure kind of throws cold water on predictions that Internet advertising will continue to grow this year, just at a slower rate.

When TNS Media Intelligence reports its first quarter data, we'll get an even better historical perspective on just how bad things were last quarter; it has been tallying this data for decades. Speaking of which my historical perspective goes back quite aways as well -- and I've never seen anything even close to this kind of percentage decline.