Tough times ahead for Indian advertising, warns Warc

Warc, the marketing intelligence service, today released their adspend forecast for 2013

and it does not make for pretty reading.

Warc's assessment for 12 major advertising markets sees overall growth at 4.3 percent at

current prices in 2013 year-on-year.

[caption id="attachment_537066" align="alignleft" width="380"] India remains one of the high-growth markets with growth projected at 9 percent, behind Brazil, China and Russia. Pic courtesy IBNLive.[/caption]

It gets worse if forecast inflation is taken into account, dropping to 1.6 percent.

There's a silver lining though. India still remains one of the high-growth markets (in a

comparative sense and at current prices) with growth projected at 9 percent, behind Brazil

(9.5 percent), China (12.5 percent) and Russia (14.6 percent).

Other countries studied in the research include Australie (2.6 percent), Canada (4.7

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percent), France (1.3 percent), Germany (1.7 percent), Italy (1.7 percent), Japan (1.0

percent), UK (4.0 percent) and the US (2.5 percent).

Looking at the global picture, it's no surprise, then, that WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell said

this to Times of India a few days ago . "I am still optimistic in the long run but Indians are rather depressed and lacking in self confidence... Coming from the UK, where we scramble to get 0.1% or half a percent growth, we would settle for 5%. So, one wonders why? Obviously, there are challenges.

Of the four BRIC countries, India probably slowed the quickest - not the most, but the

quickest. When we look at India, our business this year will grow at about 10% - topline

will be around $500 million. It's firing on all cylinders, all the businesses are doing well.

Now, if the GDP grows at 5%, we should grow at 10% because we seemed to grow about

at twice the rate of GDP."