India to beat Singapore in adspend for 2019

Singapore’s bicentennial year is expected to boost advertising by 1%.

Advertising growth in Singapore is expected to lag those of its Asian peers and hit 1% in 2019, Magna revealed in a report. The Asia Pacific region is expected to be the largest advertising market after North America, with the Indian subcontinent comprising India (+15%), Sri Lanka (+14%), and Pakistan (+15%), as well as China (+10%) and Taiwan (+7%) leading the growth.

Despite a bleak regional outlook, Singapore’s advertising sales are expected to finally stabilise and recover by +1.2% in 2019, following three years of declines.

“This is in-line with prior expectations,” Magna said, adding that this will bring the total Singapore advertising economy to $2.2b (US$1.6b). In 2020, the advertising economy of Singapore is expected to increase by +2.3% to reach $2.3b.

This rebound in the city-state will include television, which is expected to grow by +2.0%, breaking a string of five straight years of declines. Television spending in Singapore remains 19% below its all-time peak from 2004, however.

“TV broadcasters have tried to continually raise prices, but are unable to increase pricing enough to offset shrinking inventory due to declining viewing,” Magna commented.

Meanwhile, digital advertising formats are expected to grow by +21% in 2019, led by strong growth in social (+28%), video (+27%), and search (+20%). Digital formats still only represent 25% of total budgets. “Strong growth is expected to continue through the end of our forecast period,” Magna added.

2019 is Singapore’s bicentennial year, and there will be additional ad spending from the government as a result, the report said. “Whilst this will be a tailwind for print, radio, and OOH, print will still decline nearly as severely as last year, and radio will decline by -5% compared to growth in 2018. Without the bicentennial, declines would be even more severe,” Magna added.