|
|
|
|
|
With over thirty years' involvement in strategy planning and media buying for European ad. campaigns, Fox Media has all the skills, knowledge, contacts and experience to ensure that your media campaign in Europe is planned and implemented successfully, whatever your (or your client's) spend level. You'll find our full contact details here. Wherever you are in the world, we look forward to hearing from you!
|
|
From pan-continental TV opportunities to precise, specifically-targeted local media, the media landscape in Europe in 2009 is impressive in its flexibility - a key consideration during these challenging times.
Our media planning and purchasing services are equally flexible, offering sound, objective advice and delivering impressive buying results, whatever your budget.
Depending on their targeting requirements, advertisers who wish to convey a message across the whole European land mass can choose from a dazzling array of broadcast, print and online options.
Television
Access to television is universal in Europe with 97% of EU households having at least one television. From a situation in which there were just forty-seven national channels twenty years ago, the European broadcasting industry has developed into a pluralistic and diverse media landscape, with more than 3,300 channels available across the continent. And people are spending more time watching television than ever. Average European viewing time was 3 hours and 47 minutes per day in 2008, three minutes more than in 2007.
Having said that, technology is changing well-established viewing patterns. On-demand viewing services, for instance, are growing rapidly, with important implications for media planning and buying. The European Audiovisual Observatory has identified (October 2009) 696 services from 366 different providers that were operational at the end of December 2008. The United Kingdom had the most services (145), followed by France (106) and Italy (93). More than half these services were delivered via the internet, 30% on a DSL network (in the IPTV mode), 7% on cable and less than 3% by satellite.
Many of the pan-Euro TV stations continue to offer 'ad. windows' into specific countries or groups of countries - and it's at this level that they start to compete with indigenous channels and other national media. (In media buying terms, one practical effect of this is that it is often necessary to talk to different sales teams about either pan-European or country-specific airtime).
Pan-Euro TV isn't just about reaching mass markets - many stations also offer opportunities for targeting specific interest groups: arte, BBC World, Bloomberg, Cartoon Network, CNBC Europe, CNN, Discovery, EuroNews, Eurosport, Jetix, MTV, National Geographic Channel, Sky News and TV5, amongst others, all offer a degree of audience selectivity, with 'upward' links to global media networks.
|
The same is true in press, with newspaper media such as the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, USA Today, Metro and The Wall Street Journal Europe making it easy to reach the region's business élite as well as other less discrete target groups.
In magazines, there's a kaleidoscope of pan-Euros to choose from, including predictably titles aimed at the business community, such as The Economist, BusinessWeek, Euromoney, Time, Forbes, Scientific American and Fortune (amongst others), but also an ever-growing list of lifestyle titles such as Cosmopolitan, Wallpaper*, FHM, Hello!, Playboy, Elle and (good old?) Reader's Digest to name - again - but a few ...
More than 150 million newspapers are sold and read by over 300 million Europeans every day. Some countries have a strong line up of national newspaper media - nowhere perhaps as strong as in the UK. Countries such as Germany and Sweden have strong regional newspapers, but arguably no truly national titles, though the growth of free newspapers - the Metro phenomenon being a case in point - is beginning to upset this established order of things.
The "integrated sell" is the name of the game nowadays, with grouping of a publisher's media and/or different publishers getting together to offer a range of attractive joint deals across many - or just a few - countries.
|
|
|
Radio and (in particular) online continue to grow at impressive rates. The lingering death of analogue is the prelude to a new digital dawn, with wave upon wave of new broadcast options being launched every month.
Online is being used by many as a 'standalone' medium, though most are still utilising it as an interactive extension of broadcast and print media. The attractions of the internet's flexibility and immediacy are only slightly dampened by the problem of achieving - or, at least, being sure of achieving - any kind of mass audience coverage in such a vast sea of opportunities. But the future of online may well be measureable.
Across Europe, Nielsen already provides online audience measurement systems in France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland; set to launch in January 2010, the UKOM Audience Planning System (APS) promises to give advertisers and their agencies "the ability to plan media schedules around a single, benchmark source of highly accurate and consistent online data".
One suspects that the lack of hard data has been one of the reasons behind the growth of free, user-generated and social media content, as web site owners look to both users and advertisers to support their online ventures in the face of the consumers' thumbs-down to paid-for. All of which makes talk of an increase in 'paid-for' content by certain news-based media sound intriguing - one to watch over the next few years.
Media technologies continue to converge across Europe, as streaming tv and downloadable video are ported to PCs (typically free of charge), posters send SMS messages to passing mobile owners and radio goes worldwide via the net. Digital is also having a major impact in cinema, too, with digitalisation well under way and leading to lower production costs - with implications for more and better product and lower entry costs.
|
Posters (especially out-of-home, or OOH, as we seem to say nowadays) have never been the easiest medium to plan and buy across Europe. Better sales co-ordination and more and more attempts at packaging are providing reasons to be cheerful. And in the longer term, digital outdoor holds out the prospect of slicker, centrally-controllable and much more impactful OOH campaigns. The digitalisation process is proceeding apace: according to one estimate, digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad. revenues in Western Europe are growing rapidly, from €160m in 2007 to €626m by 2012. By 2012, DOOH's share is expected to grow to approximately 10 per cent of total OOH ad. revenues …
But, for the moment, media planners who aren't buying into environments such as airports, where there is some consistency of poster sizes and specs., still tend to have to take countries one at a time and piece the poster jigsaw together. There are always - of course - many big brand multi-country outdoor campaigns; but like its local press, Europe's poster advertising medium is most often used to address the fine tuning of an advertiser's media strategy.
Media research reports are available which provide detailed information about coverage levels and other more insightful aspects of the European media scene.
Broadbrush surveys covering the whole continent offer an excellent vade mecum for strategic planning. Companies offering national reports such as Target Group Index, Nielsen and ABC provide a service more tailored to the specifics of a country's own media profile. And many local media are wise to the attractions of hard data about audiences - and have invested accordingly.
Fox Media can ensure that your European campaign is a great success.
Contact us today - and we'll show you.
Download brochure 
|
|
|
|
European Media & Marketing Survey: measures both international and national media, TV and print among Europe’s affluent target groups. Issued twice a year as a two-year database.