‘Acche din‘ ahead for the Indian media industry

Here's some good news for the media industry. WPP's media buying arm GroupM says that advertising budgets are expected to come in 12.6 percent higher than in 2014, which means media houses will be competing for a kitty of around Rs 49,000 crore reports CNBC-TV18’s Pavni Mittal.A stable government, increased consumer spending and the hope for ‘acche din’ these three factors will see advertisers opening their wallets wider in 2015. So, says group M's annual this year next year report on the growth forecast in the world of advertising.The reports says that advertising expenditure or ad ex in 2015 will grow by 12.6 percent over last year. Now this looks like a flat figure given the 12.5 percent growth clocked in 2014, but GroupM says the spends this time will be from brands, and not political parties.CVL Srinivas, CEO, GroupM South Asia said, “Just to put the numbers in perspective, last year when we said that the industry grew overall at about 12.5 percent or will grow, the numbers were 2.5 percent due to elections and roughly 10 or a little more due to the industry, so there was definitely a bump up because of the elections. This year we don't have the general elections but we may have a few state elections. So, if you compare like to like roughly about 10 percent of last year is going to be about 12 percent of this year.Digital continues to be the fastest growing medium and thanks to the upcoming ICC World Cup and new channel launches, ad spends on TV are expected to grow by 16 percent. Print media, however, could see ad-ex growth slowing to just five percent.CVL Srinivas also added, “We find magazines to be degrowing year on year, we also find some segments of English language press under pressure, particularly the business side. We are finding a lot of attraction for the language papers, especially some of the Hindi language papers are doing well, they are growing at a decent double digit number year on year.Measurement continues to be the industry's biggest challenge. But the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) is expected to be up and running around April and a revalidation of the Indian readership survey is underway and stakeholders are confident that 2015 will be a better year for Indian media.