Product placement emerges as fastest growing part of '04 ad market

Wrapping up a week in which some of Madison Avenue's leading forecasters upgraded their final outlooks for 2004 - and issued concerns about 2005 - one of the industry's top ad trackers Thursday released a report indicating the pace of ad momentum quickened through the first three quarters of the year. Ad spending rose 8.3 percent across the media tracked by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, a significant increase in the rate of ad expansion from the first half of the year, which was up only 6.0 percent. The third quarter, which experienced incremental ad spending related to the 2004 Summer Olympics, as well as some political campaign advertising, soared 11 percent.

Surprisingly, spot TV was one of the weakest links, rising only 3.4 percent despite the incremental effects of Olympic spending on NBC's affiliates and on the mostly local TV investments of political candidates.

But one of the fastest forms of TV-related marketing wasn't advertising at all. It was the burgeoning practices of program product placement. While Nielsen's new product placement tracking service does not provide explicit dollar values to such deals, Nielsen said the top 10 brands more than doubled the number of product plugs compared with the first nine months of 2003.

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