Big media put money where their mouth is: top five companies spent $4.5b on TV ads in '02. (TV Buyer).

Broadcasting & Cable, June, 2003 by McClellan, Steve

They sell a lot of ads, but they buy a lot of them, too. The top five media companies--Viacom, AOL Time Warner, Disney, Fox and General Electric-owned NBC--spent a combined $4.5 billion in advertising last year, up 3.5% over the year before. Over the past five years, ad spending by the Big Five has grown an average 4.9% a year.

Most of the outlay, of course, is to promote theatrical releases produced by their movie studios. Strangely, NBC, the only network that doesn't own a studio, reaps the biggest revenues from the media giants that do. Its Thursday lineup is prime time for movie advertising: Last year, it got $113 million of the $215 million spent to advertise films that opened on Friday. AOL TW and Disney were among the top 10 ad spenders last...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.