But according to Nielsen, many of China’s advertisers took a break from advertising in August, sending overall ad spending in China tumbling to levels last seen in May 2008, when the Sichuan earthquake hit and advertising was suspended for three days.

Advertising spending in China grew, year over year, by just 7% in August, Nielsen reported Monday.  In comparison, China’s ad spending grew by an average of 19% in the seven months leading up to the Olympic Games.

In August, sponsor advertising grew by 40% — or RMB2.8 billion (US$370 million) in China, but that increase was not enough to compensate for the withdrawal of the rest of the market’s advertisers.

“This is quite unprecedented, based on our monitoring of advertising behavior and spending for previous Olympic Games.  Rather than attempt to battle it out with the Sponsors, other players opted simply to ’sit out’ the month of August,” Richard Basil-Jones, Managing Director, Media Asia Pacific, Nielsen, noted.  “With the London Games four years out, time will tell whether this was a situation unique to China, or whether in the future, other non-Sponsors will chose to sit on the side lines, leaving the Games open and clear for Sponsors to enjoy maximum cut through in an unusually uncluttered advertising environment.”

Despite the ongoing global financial turmoil, advertisers returned to China’s ad market after the Olympic Games.  In September, ad spending in China registered healthy, near pre-Games growth of 16%, according to Nielsen.

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in the Financial Times.

Flagging sales in September, when growth dipped to 4.5% — a full percentage point below August growth levels, drove the declines.

“Shoppers are still trading down,” Mike Watkins, senior manager, retailer services, Nielsen noted.  “Family shoppers in particular, are trying to save money, with 70% saying on they are looking to economize on grocery shopping — up from 63% in June.” 

Among the top UK food retailers, Tesco remained the dominant value retailer, with a 28.3% share of grocery market spending during 12-week period ending October 4, 2008 — up 4.8% over the chain’s 28.0% share of value sales during the same period last year.

Meanwhile, Asda widened its lead in value sales over Sainsbury (13.9% share), achieving a 15.4% share of value food sales (and 8.3% year over year value growth) versus its 2007 share (14.7%).

Morrisons recorded the strongest year-over-year value sales growth of the top four food retailers (+9.6%), while Iceland showed the strongest overall growth (14.5%) during the 12-week period.

View the full press release.

AT&T Worldnet Search (+203.8%) and Comcast Search (+30.9%) showed the largest year-over-year growth for the time period.

Search providers are ranked by the total number of search queries conducted at the provider.

View the full press release.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in the San Jose Mercury News.

View Nielsen’s ranking of the top online search providers in the U.S. for the previous month.