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DTC INSIGHTS Alert: 'Reported' DTC Ad Spending Rebounds in July-Sept. Period

Finally, some positive news for DTC marketers, agencies and media companies. After several quarters of declining advertising spend, budgets for DTC marketing bounced back in the third quarter. According to data from TNS Media Intelligence, the “reported” spend for DTC ads in the third quarter rose to $1.16 billion in the July-September period, which represents an increase of roughly 15% compared with TNS’s “reported” spending of roughly $1 billion in the year-ago period.

This marks the first quarterly increase in “reported” DTC spending in almost two years, and it comes at a time when most advertising categories are showing lackluster growth. For the first nine months of 2009, TNS data shows DTC advertising with an increase of just under 1%. However, this compares with the 6.4% decline that TNS had reported for the first half of the year. (The Nielsen Company has not yet reported its DTC advertising spend for Q3 2009.)

Among media channels, the Internet fared better than any other medium in the first nine months of 2009. Reported spending more than tripled in the nine-month period to $221 million (this total represents display ads only). Newspapers also recovered lost advertising among DTC marketers in the January-September period, with roughly a 25% increase in “reported” ad dollars (rising to $104 million through September in 2009).

The leading advertisers by brand in the first nine months of 2009 were Lipitor (Pfizer), Abilify (Bristol-Myers Squibb/Otsuka America), Cymbalta (Eli Lilly) and Advair (GlaxoSmithKline) – each of which had “reported” spending of more than $125 million, according to TNS. Among brands “new” to mass DTC advertising in 2009, only Pristiq (Wyeth) ranked among the Top 20 advertisers on the TNS listing.