CME not expecting ad upturn soon

Pan central and eastern European broadcaster CME says that advertising spend bottomed out in the third quarter of 2009 and expects the situation to be stable in the fourth quarter. However, it does not expect to see any significant upturn in the short or medium term.

Petr Dvorak, general director of TV Nova and vice-president, corporate finance Mark Wyllie recently presented at investment bank Morgan Stanley’s investor conference in Barcelona. The bank noted: “CME’s message was notably different from other European broadcasters in the sense that adspend has just started to stabilise at low levels while national advertising revenue has materially improved.”

The broadcaster added that it was looking to increase local productions over costly foreign imported programming. “The management outlined the importance of in-house production in the control of programming costs. While in-house content is not that much cheaper than foreign content, it can sit in the library for longer which allows it to be re-used,” the bank added.