TV Broadcasting group Media for Europe - which owns the Mediaset TV assets in Italy and the Mediaset Espana TV assets in Spain - reported 1H numbers last night.
My key takeaway from these numbers: if you have confidence in your TV linear business - despite the pressures - it is still more than possible to see continued growth.
3 points from the results:
1. Advertising revenues in both Italy and Spain remain strong. 1H Net Advertising revenues were up 6.1% YoY in Spain and 6.8% in Italy of which the bulk will relate to the TV advertising, and particularly linear, business.
2. Unlike some of its peers in other markets, MFE has made a point of emphasising that, while the linear TV side faces pressure, it is still an incredibly valuable business and commands reach that the online platforms cannot have, as shown in the chart below. It is probably not a coincidence then that its advertising performance has been so strong. If you denigrate your core business, do not expect advertisers not to take notice. MFE has taken the opposite approach.
3. For the 9 months, MFE stated that the trends were similar to the 1H (as in point 1). It did state Q4 was uncertain given both macro trends and the tough comps. However, given its outperformance of expectations in the 1st nine months of the year, my view is the risk is more on the upside than downside.
As usual, this is not investment advice.
#broadcasters #advertising
VP Marketing at Insurify
1wDo you believe that the efficient market hypothesis roughly holds for marketing channel investments? TV should be discounted relative to easy to measure channels like SEM. But are. There enough sophisticated market participant to efficiency? My pet theory is no. That broadly the current cohort of marketers look too much like me and avoid the difficult to measure channels too much Unlike financial markets, its not really possible to have speculators enter and drive the assets to efficiency and provide information discovery