Week of January 23, 2023

This week MediaRadar reviewed advertising from the week of January 9, 2023, and compared it to ads that ran the week of January 2, 2023.

This article highlights four categories, but you can see the shifts in ad spend among all categories here. We look at Quarter-Over-Quarter (QoQ), Month-Over-Month (MoM) and Week-Over-Week (WoW).

Here is a full list of advertising changes by category. (Don’t worry, it’s ungated)

Here are some key weekly takeaways from advertising shifts that took place.

Non-Alcoholic Beverages poured over $7.5mm into advertising from January 9th through January 15th. That’s over a 40% WoW increase. Advertising for soft drinks was up over 1000% WoW. MediaRadar also noted Sports and Performance Drinks decreased ad spend by nearly 20% WoW. While meal replacement drinks and milk advertisers didn’t run ads this week. 

MediaRadar’s data sample revealed Technology advertising was flat this week. Once again, these brands ran ads tallying over $175mm. The Telecommunications category, which includes companies like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, reduced ad spend nearly 20% WoW. This little break isn’t surprising after their heavy advertising during the holiday season. We also saw Consumer Electronics companies and Software brands increase their weekly ad investment, but the increase in these two was under 5%.  A noteworthy WoW increase in ad spend came from Information Technology companies such as, Go Daddy, Google and Wix. This week they increased ad spend by nearly 150% WoW to over $25mm. 

MediaRadar observed Athletics advertising to be down this week. Typically, this category has a strong Q1 as advertisers are promoting healthy lifestyles for the new year.  However, during the second week of 2023, we saw this category down over 50% WoW ($3.5mm). The driver of “New Year’s resolution advertising” within this category  is fitness equipment. In week 2 of the new year, we saw a 90% decrease in ad spend WoW. We also noticed smaller advertisers like cycling, firearms and skateboarding equipment companies didn’t advertise this week.

Beauty advertisers began reducing their ad spend during the week of December 26th where we saw an over 30% WoW decrease in advertising. During the first week of January this category was down another 20%! Now for the 3rd week in a row we saw ad spend in this category down again. Total investment among beauty advertisers this week was $35mm, which was an under 5% reduction from the week of January 2. Deodorant advertisers were down 20% WoW, while Cosmetics increased over 1000% WoW to nearly $10mm in ad spend.

For a full breakdown of which product categories are buying ads now, click here. The list is updated weekly – you can subscribe to receive it in your inbox.