Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research has released preliminary figures. Nielsen Monitor-Plus MD Jeff King elaborated on the findings by saying, “Ad spending was effectively spread evenly across the year. The strongest quarter was the third. That period received an additional boost from the Summer Olympics and political advertising

“The Summer Olympics, with total spending reaching over $1.8 billion, contributed to much of Network and Cable’s increase. After several years of slow growth, Syndicated TV advertising rose by 13.7 per cent. Automotive advertising experienced the largest dollar increase, with the prescription drug and credit card services categories following. These three categories contributed to an overall increase of $2 billion compared to the same period last year.”

The top advertisers: Procter & Gamble topped the list of advertisers by sinking in $3,030 million. This marked an increase of 9.5 per cent. General Motors spent $2,581 an increase of 19.2 per cent. DaimlerChrysler AG spent $1,800 a healthy increase of 34.6 per cent.

Time Warner spent $1,511 which marked an increase of just 0.6 per cent. Disney spent less on advertising itself. It spent $1,352 million which marked a reduction of 2.1 per cent. Ad spend for the top 10 companies grew to $16.6 billion, up 11.1 per cent from last year. Auto advertisers increased budgets for many of their vans and SUVs.

Product placement is on the rise: Nielsen's product placement tracking service has noted continued growth in the integration of product occurrences in primetime network programming. with the Top 10 brands in the product placement category totaling 9,334 occurrences last year.

The top 10 programmes that featured product placements accounted for 23,526 brand occurrences. The number one brand, Coca-Cola Classic, was seen mainly on American Idol. NetZero enjoyed many occurrences on NBC's reality show Fear Factor. On the other hand, Nike and Ford were well represented on many different programmes.

The busines based reality show The Apprentice had 4,262 product placement occurences. Fox's American Idol had 3,065 occurences. The Amazing Race on CBS had 2,004 occurences while Fear Factor had 1,963 occurences.