TV Advertising in Kazakhstan: Market, Prices and Trends 2024–2025

Overview of Kazakhstan's TV advertising market: volumes, pricing, ratings, and booking trends. A practical guide for media sellers and advertising agencies.

Volume and Structure of the Kazakhstan TV Advertising Market

According to industry association estimates and data from major media sellers, the volume of Kazakhstan's television advertising market in 2023 amounted to approximately 80–90 billion tenge. In 2024, the market is demonstrating moderate growth of 8–12% in national currency terms, partly explained by inflationary pressure on GRP costs and partly by a real increase in advertising budgets from the FMCG, financial, and telecommunications sectors.

Television continues to hold the largest share in the overall media mix of Kazakhstani advertisers — approximately 40–45% of total media advertising expenditure. By comparison, digital in the broad sense accounts for around 35%, out-of-home advertising (including DOOH — digital out-of-home) for approximately 10%, and radio for around 5%.

The key players on the supply side are First Channel Eurasia, Qazaqstan, Channel 31, El Arna, KTK, and a number of niche thematic channels. Consolidation of inventory among several major media sellers remains a defining characteristic of the Kazakhstani market: two to three sellers control more than 70% of total advertising airtime.

Pricing: How GRP Costs Are Formed in Kazakhstan

Basic Mechanics

The standard for selling television advertising in Kazakhstan is the GRP model (Gross Rating Point). The cost of one rating point (CPP — Cost Per Point) varies depending on the channel, target audience, and season. In 2024, CPP benchmarks for prime time on top channels in the "All 18–54" audience range from 400,000 to 700,000 tenge per point for national reach placements.

Seasonality has a significant impact on pricing. Traditionally, peak periods include:

• November – December (pre-New Year season): CPP growth of 25–40% above the base level;
• March (Nauryz): high demand from retail and FMCG, growth of 15–20%;
• September – October (start of the business season): moderate growth of 10–15%.

The summer months — June and July — remain a period of low demand with discounts of up to 20–25%, creating opportunities for yield management: skillful management of advertising inventory during the low season allows revenue to be maintained without price dumping.

Target Audiences and Premiums

Narrowly targeted audiences — "Women 25–45," "Men 18–34," "Above-average income" — are traded at a premium of 15–30% above the base CPP. This is logical: the advertiser pays not for reach, but for contact quality. TV media planning in such cases requires a precise understanding of the rating base provided by Nielsen Kazakhstan — the country's sole official television audience measurement service.

Audience Measurement: The Role of Nielsen and System Limitations

Nielsen Kazakhstan conducts measurements using people meter panels in major cities — Almaty, Astana, and a number of regional centers. The panel covers approximately 600–700 households, which, given the country's population of 19 million, represents a minimally sufficient but not excessive volume for statistical accuracy in narrow audiences.

The limitations of the system are well known to the professional community:

• Insufficient coverage of small towns and rural areas;
• Data delays when working with daily and weekly reports;
• Lack of integration with data on content consumption via OTT and Smart TV.

The last point is becoming increasingly critical: according to data from Kazakhstani telecommunications operators, Smart TV penetration in households with a television has exceeded 45% in urban areas. A portion of the audience watching television content via the internet effectively falls outside measurement — this distorts actual ratings and complicates advertising campaign analytics.

Booking Trends and Demand Structure in 2024–2025

Growth of Cross-Media Strategies

Major advertisers — telecom operators, banks, retail chains — are increasingly building cross-media campaigns, combining TV, digital video, and DOOH into a unified reach strategy. This is changing the logic of procurement: agencies are demanding from media sellers not just inventory, but end-to-end advertising campaign analytics with cross-channel reach deduplication.

Selling television advertising as part of cross-media packages gives sellers the opportunity to protect the share of the budget that would otherwise flow into digital. However, this requires technical infrastructure: unified TV, radio, and DOOH media planning systems, data integration, and automated performance measurement.

Compression of Booking Timelines

Whereas just three years ago a quarter was considered the standard planning horizon for major campaigns, today a significant portion of budgets are being committed just 2–4 weeks before placement. This puts pressure on the operational efficiency of media sellers: managing advertising inventory in short-cycle mode is impossible without automated calculations, availability checks, and order processing.

Programmatic and Automation

Programmatic in the classical sense (real-time RTB auction) has not yet taken hold in Kazakhstani television — the market is too consolidated and the measurement infrastructure is not ready. However, automation of advertising sales at the level of internal processes — planning, invoicing, campaign performance monitoring — is being actively implemented by advanced players. Ad-sales automation makes it possible to reduce operational costs by 20–35% and decrease the number of errors associated with manual data entry.

Platforms of the media seller class, such as OpenMediaLogic, allow planning, booking, advertising yield management, and reporting to be unified within a single interface — which is particularly relevant for operators simultaneously managing TV, radio, and DOOH inventory.

Practical Conclusions for Market Participants

The Kazakhstan TV advertising market remains the largest and most mature segment of media advertising in Central Asia. At the same time, it stands on the threshold of structural changes: the pressure of cross-media planning, shorter booking horizons, and demand for end-to-end analytics are transforming the requirements for the entire sales operating model.

For media sellers and advertising agencies, this means several practical priorities:

• Invest in yield management tools that allow dynamic price management depending on inventory load and seasonality;
• Build cross-media packages with transparent reach analytics — this is a competitive advantage when defending budgets with clients;
• Automate routine sales operations so that commercial teams can focus on strategy rather than manual order processing;
• Work with measurement data critically — account for the limitations of panel research and supplement it with proprietary data on content consumption.

If you want to understand how to build ad-sales process automation on the basis of a unified platform — from planning to campaign analytics — explore the capabilities of OpenMediaLogic for TV, radio, and DOOH media sellers.