Fourth Quarter Ad Market Opened With Strong Gains In October.

The U.S. ad market entered fourth quarter with some noteworthy resilience according to the ad tracking firm Guideline. It reports marketers increased spending 5.7% in October, compared to a year earlier. That comes on the heels of gains in September, with the revised tally showing a 9.0% year-to-year gain for the month. The increase also suggests that the spending declines in July and August — the first back-to-back monthly pullbacks in adspend in more than two years — were a momentary blip rather than a larger pullback in marketers’ investments.

The latest data again shows why broadcasters should be putting more of their sales focus on digital. Guideline says digital ad spending increased 13% in October compared to the prior year, while overall traditional media spending dipped 10%. The company doesn’t release radio-specific tracking data.

The good news for media companies is that the increased spending is broad based, with the top 10 ad categories posting a 2% uptick in spending year to year during October, while remaining category spending was up 11%.

Guideline says the federal government shutdown had limited impact on ad spending across the economy. “Based on historical comps, the government shutdown has little to no impact on ad spend,” the firm said in a report last month. Analysts say travel-related categories and the pharmaceutical sector are probably the hardest hit.

Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker is a composite monthly index from Standard Media Index, designed to provide a real-world measure of U.S. ad spending, based on actual invoiced media buys, including radio, from the major agencies and their clients. As such, it is mostly representative of spending by larger national advertisers.

The data is powered by SMI and covers radio, television, digital, print, and out-of-home media types. It is based on actual spending data from the SMI pool partners at major holding companies and large ad agencies, representing 95% of all U.S. national brand ad spending.

See Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker HERE.