Advertising is already being hit. Two podcasts that I listen to have commented that advertisers have already cut back. Forecasts for television ads are not looking good.
As recession fears mount following Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, US media and internet companies face a potential multibillion-dollar hit to ad spending that could potentially deliver the death knell to traditional television advertising.
“Given the ongoing secular headwinds facing the linear TV ecosystem, we worry that television could mirror the fate of radio and newspapers during past recessions,” MoffettNathanson analysts Michael Nathanson and Robert Fishman warned in a report last week.
If a recession were to materialize, MoffettNathanson estimates US ad spending would come in $45 billion below current forecasts.
Does that include advertising that is passed off as “news”? I call the segment between the weather and sports on the local news “the clown show”, because it’s usually stupid criminals and people behaving badly. Last night, it was two promotional pieces, one for a new hamburger place, and I forget what the other was. As soon as they teased that garbage, I went to brush my teeth.
Ad revenue may be down for a while until the dust settles. Not much need to advertise cars now. They are selling like hot cakes. But that may change once tariffs are in place.
Revising tariffs every few days makes advertising problematic. How often and how many times do you update your ad?
Probably not. In the real world of business, “advertising” is something that has real money paid by the business advertising their product to a media form that presents that advertising to an audience. Advertising passed off as news is often only “paid” in kind or in some other roundabout way.
Someone on this board, some time ago, noted he had worked at a TV station. One one occasion, the station was doing a remote “report” from a new restaurant, the sort of nonsense I see being passed off as “news” several times a week. The owner of the restaurant said the “live remote report” by that station, and similar “reports” by every other TV station in town, was part of her paid advertising package.
I have not seen it in recent years, but the local “news” used to do a piece every Thanksgiving evening of people lined up at Best Buy for “black Friday”. The “reporter” would go down the line. asking each person what they were there for. Each person would then recite their piece about one of the items on offer. The entire thing reeked of paid advertising.