A Look Ahead at the Money in the Communications Industry

Veronis Suhler Stevenson will release predictions in the Communications Industry Forecast today. Veronis Suhler invests in information, education and media, and those fields are what it measured in the forecast, the 23rd annual version. The company looks at the total spending on communications, including advertising, spending from consumers or businesses and items like retransmission fees for television. It includes traditional and new media along with information providers to businesses (like Lexis-Nexis), trade shows and education and training information, making its analysis broader than most other media reports. Despite all the bad news about the media industry, it is expected to be the third-fastest-growing economic sector over the next five years, after mining and construction. Almost none of that growth is forecast to come from shrinking traditional media, however. Instead, it will be drawn from areas like word-of-mouth marketing and public relations (with a 9.2 percent compound annual growth rate from 2008 through 2013), branded entertainment (9.3 percent) and the Internet and mobile devices (10.2 percent).