IFR: Retailers' Tablet Advertising Proliferates

By Joseph Palenchar On Dec 5 2011 - 6:01am

NEW YORK — Retailers’ tablet advertising spiked up in the second half of this year as more tablets made their way into distribution, IFR Monitoring found in tracking retailers’ advertising.

In their newspaper ads and circulars during the first 10 months of the year, IFR also found that retailers advertised tablets from Samsung, Toshiba, Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Asus more often than they advertised Apple tablets, yet Apple remained the No. 1 tablet supplier in units and dollars in the U.S. during that time.

During the first January through October 2010 period, only three brands of tablets were advertised by retailers in newspapers and circulars because the category was in its infancy. The only brands advertised were Apple, Archos and Viewsonic.

In fact, tablets appeared only 825 times in newspaper ads and circulars in the January through Octo ber 2010 period but exploded to 25,870 appearances during the same period this year, IFR found.

In other findings, IFR statistics show that 10 brands accounted for 82 percent of the 38 tablet brands advertised by retailers during the first 10 months of 2011. Samsung and Toshiba were the first- and second-most advertised brands, followed closely by Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Asus and Apple, in that order. Those brands were followed in the top 10 by Motorola, Archos, Coby and BlackBerry.

The next 10-most-advertised brands, in order, were Velocity, Viewsonic, Pandigital, Sylvania, Sony, Lenovo, HTC, Dell, Nextbook (E-Fun), and Huawei.

All told, 20 brands accounted for 98 percent of the tablets advertised by retailers in newspapers and circulars during the 10-month period, IFR found.

Similarly, IFR found that 10 retailers accounted for 80 percent of the tablets advertised, with the top 20 retail advertisers of tablets accounting for 94 percent of the number of time tablets were included in ads.

By far, Best Buy was the largest advertiser, placing tablets 6,188 times in its newspaper ads and circulars, well ahead of No. 2 tablet advertiser hhgregg, which placed tablets 3,883 times in print ads.

The other top 10 advertisers of tablets, in order, were Office Depot, Fry’s Electronics, OfficeMax, Staples, Target, Comp USA, Sears and Toys “R” Us.

The next 10 most-frequent tablet advertisers were, in order, were P.C. Richard and Son, RadioShack, BrandsMart USA, Walgreens, ABC Warehouse, Conn’s, Sixth Avenue Electronics, Kmart and Fred Meyer.

Most of the top 20 tablet advertisers didn’t advertise tablets in print at all during the yearago period. Only Best Buy, Sears, RadioShack and BrandMart in this year’s top 20 were advertsing tablets during the year-ago period, IFR found.

Advertising by Best Buy exploded from only 662 tablets appearing in its newspaper ads and circulars in the first 10 months of 2010 to 6,188 in the first 10 months of 2011. Sears advertising exploded from 41 to 959 during the two periods.

IFR Monitoring, owned by the GfK Group, specializes in research on the technical consumer goods in more than 60 countries. IFR tracks shelf share, print-ad share and web-ad share to “reflect what is actually in the eyes of the consumer,” the company said.