With 21.67 billion Euros advertising investments in the above the line media in the first nine months, the German advertising market has developed positively recording a plus of 1.11% vs. the same period last year.
Mobile remains the strongest growing medium with +33.24% (424 million Euros) − although still on a low level. Cinema and OoH follow (+19.90% resp. +7.14%). Newspapers have increased slightly (+0.63%), whereas consumer magazines saw a slight loss (-1.31%). Internet investments decreased by 1.97%. TV remains the leading medium with 10.13 billion Euros spent (+0.27%) (Nielsen Media Research).
That investments grow only moderately, despite of the good overall economic situation in Germany, is on the one hand due to cuts in advertising budgets in some cases. On the other hand, this results from the fact that spendings are increasingly shifted in ad channels not covered by Nielsen, such as search, social media and programmatic advertising and also video advertising on YouTube, hitting e.g. the medium internet.
Forecast 2017-2019
According to Zenith in September, the German advertising market would continue to grow only moderately with +1.3% in 2017 and +2.3% in the next year. For 2019, they expect ad revenues to increase by 2.1%. Growth driver is internet that is to experience a strong growth of 8% each year. In their Mobile Advertising Forecast from October, Zenith project German mobile revenues to continue to grow at a tearing pace, but still on a low level: 483 million Euros net would be invested in mobile in 2017 − that would lead to a share of 2.4% in the total advertising pie. The share is to increase to 5.3% in 2019.
Magna Global continued to predict in their June forecast German advertising revenues to grow by 2.2% this year.
Carat adjusted their media spend projections from September last year for the German advertising market in 2017 upwards: Now, they prospect a growth of 2.6% (formerly +2.1%). For 2018, they estimate an increase of 3.0%
Regarding digital advertising (online and mobile) in Germany, the association of online marketers OVK hold to their forecast of spring projecting net investments to grow by 7% in 2017 to a record sum of 1.91 billion Euros.