Inserts industry report Q3 & Q4 2011

Introduction

2011 saw the inserts market bounce back with a vengeance. The whole market, as measured by the DMA Inserts Council, was up by 6% from 2010. Four out of the five inserts sectors which were measured experienced positive growth in 2011: Daily newspapers, Sunday newspapers, Saturday supplements and Magazines. However, Sunday supplements were adversely affected by the closure of the News of the World in July 2011 and saw a drop of 32% from Q3 2010 to Q3 2011and a drop of 58% from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011. Assuming that the total figure for Sunday supplements in 2011 included figures for News of the World’s Sunday supplement from 2010, we would have seen a 10% increase in the overall inserts market in 2011.

Media owners reported increased activity from core direct response clients, including traditional mail order catalogues. Retail remained the key to recovery with significant activity from the likes of Argos, John Lewis and Debenhams.

Another sector which remained buoyant was the media/broadband category. Clients such as Sky, Virgin Media and BT have understood that inserts offer the potential to harvest large volumes of response from umbrella brand campaigns and continued to invest heavily in the medium in 2011.

Financial services inserts tend to be for credit cards or loans. With financial institutions less inclined to lend, there has been a marked decline in such inserts. Similarly, charities continued to suffer from the general financial malaise.

The overall picture from the inserts market in 2011 was one which had a remarkable upturn in spite of continuing economic woes.

inserts_industry_report_q3__q4_2011.pdf