The second biggest spending brand in 2004, Gai Zhong Gai, was still China's biggest spending local brand, but slipped to fifth place with a 26 per cent reduction in adspend last year.
The large sums of money foreign firms are throwing behind their brands to increasingly outspend local names is encapsulated by the fierce competition raging in China's toothpaste category. Huge hikes in ratecard adspend from Crest and Colgate made them the third and fourth biggest spending brands in 2005, leading a massive 80 per cent surge in oral care advertising from both MNCs and domestic firms last year.
Procter & Gamble's Oil of Olay remained the brand with China's biggest budget after topping the table last year, while shampoo stablemate Rejoice climbed into second place. "Big advertisers like P&G are advertising heavily," said Rita Chan, client services director for Nielsen Media Research. "This has created competition, and local makes have to continue to invest in adspend in order to attract the attention of consumers."
In the hotly-contested toothpaste category, new local makes, such as Diao Pei, from the well-known detergent maker of the same name, contributed to a total of 31 new oral hygiene brands that started advertising for the first time last year. Colgate and Crest also introduced lower-cost variants near local brand prices.
"Toothpaste is an interesting microcosm of what's happening in China," said Stephen Drummond, general manager and head of planning for ad agency Nitro. "As consumers' economic positions improve, it's often the little things, like an upgrade from a local brand to a big popular foreign brand, which makes people feel like they are upgrading their lives. You don't suddenly leap from subsistence to middle-class: it's these little lifestyle jumps that create massive waves in the Chinese consumer market."
Nielsen also identified a growing trend in certain niche categories such as credit cards, whisky and luggage to step up their advertising, with noticeable boosts in adspend off a relatively low base indicating the growing spending power of consumers with disposable income. Attitudes to travel are also changing, Nielsen said, prompted in part by greater freedom offered by individual traveller's schemes, which have been in place for two years.
China adspend soars in battle of the brands
Foreign brands are continuing to turn up the volume at the expense of domestic names in China's major media, for the first time occupying the top four slots in Nielsen Media Research's league table of the country's biggest-spending brands.
