Russia has begun 2009 with its TV advertising market performing much better than might have been expected during the global financial crisis.
Data produced by TNS Russia and published by Media Logics/Kommersant shows that TV ad spend in the first ten days of January grew by 10%, helped in part by discounts of up to 20%.
The best performing stations included the First Channel (+13%), Rossiya (+21%) and Ren TV (+82%), while NTV (-26%) and TNT (-24%) were among the losers.
Although Media Logics has warned that not too much should be read into such a short period of time, there are already signs that some companies, including the mobile operators MTS and VimpelCom, are buying much more airtime than in 2008.