ADVERTISING IN FRANCE TO GROW 10% IN 2021
By mid-2021, we decided to significantly revise our investment forecasts for the coming months and years, taking into account various factors.
First of all, we have re-evaluated the weight of digital in our assessments, considering that the benchmarks usually used by our industry have been underestimating the real share for several years.
It is simply a consequence of looking at the 2020 and Q1 2021 advertising results of the major platforms to see the discrepancy with the domestic figures. Thus, we are now considering a growing proportion of endemic digital players in the volume spent, which is off the radar and whose entire investment is allocated to digital. They are characterized by a performance-based approach, from app-based and mobile gaming universes.
We could summarize them as SMB’s, part of which is activated cross border from China and whose investments benefit mostly Amazon (61% of the 10,000 top sellers of the Amazon.fr marketplace are based in China) and Google or Facebook.
Given this new perspective, we estimate that the digital advertising market will represent 57% of the market in 2021, nine points higher than previous estimates.
By 2026, the weight of digital media would even reach 65% of the advertising volume, far from the 80% of the U.S. market or the 94% of the Chinese market, but in line with the global average.
French revenue growth across all media for 2021 is expected to be 10.3%, a performance that should be highlighted, as it exceeds the pre-crisis level (2019) of 1.2%. The following five years should record an average growth of 3.3%.
This fast turnaround to the pre-COVID activity seems realistic in view of the media trend over the first half of 2021 and the capacity for the economy to recover.
There is also a continuation of TV and digital convergence that will represent 79% of investment by the end of 2021, leaving little room for other media (in their traditional forms).
However, France remains behind the major advertising markets and the global average (+19%).