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AA forecast: ad market will take two years to recover – thinner pickings at Christmas

Who’d be a forecaster these days – unless you’re an epidemiologist who at least gets to frighten us all on the radio.

The latest AA/WARC forecast for UK adspend has been revised down and now says that full recovery from this pandemic year won’t occur until 2022 and, by the way, Christmas is cancelled. That’s something of an exaggeration but it forecasts that Christmas adspend will be down £724m or 10.5%, a sizeable hit.

Already stricken media like cinema and Out of home will suffer the worst outcomes.

£6bn or so spent at Christmas will still be a lifesaver for some advertisers and agencies but that’s supposing the current second wave of the pandemic doesn’t plunge the UK into full and long-lasting lockdown, in which case things will be substantially worse.

The full effect of massive job losses as the Government’s various job support schemes either end or become more selective and less generous has yet to be felt. Any such mass lockdown over such a period will kill off large swathes of the hospitality industry.

Oh well..

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