TV Ad Spend Surges In Aussie Tech Market: SMI Data

Australia’s technology marketers have increased their advertising expenditure by 53 per cent in the first quarter of 2017, with most of the extra dollars moving to the digital, TV and outdoor channels, according to new data from Standard Media Index (SMI).

The 53 per cent growth spurt saw the total technology category ad spend hit $27.5 million in the first three months of the year, with the growth rate also the fastest of any of SMI’s 25 largest product categories on which it reports ad spend.

That is a sharp increase on the 1.7 per cent rise in ad spend that the category reported for the 2016 calendar year, with those extra dollars taking the total category’s annual ad spend to $93.8 million.

SMI’s data shows technology advertisers usually allocate more than 70 per cent of their media budgets to digital media, but in the first quarter this share dipped below that level due to higher spending on TV.

In this quarter, TV took 24 per cent of all technology ad spend compared to the 7 per cent it recorded at the same time last year.

Nonetheless, technology marketers still grew their digital spend by 6 per cent in the quarter, and for the first time SMI can now isolate that spend between the market’s two key sub categories: software/services and computers/hardware.

And it’s a tale of two very different sectors, according to SMI’s managing director for Australia and NZ, Jane Schulze, with marketers in the software/services sector growing their digital ad spend by 46 per cent, while computer/hardware advertisers dialled back their digital spend by 34 per cent in the same period.

“This is actually a strong trend that the data shows has been evident since at least the first quarter of 2015,” she said.

“In that quarter, both of these technology sub categories were spending about $5.2 million each on digital media.

“But since then their media planning has diverged significantly. Software/services marketers have more than doubled digital ad spend to $11 million in the most recent quarter while marketers in the computers/hardware space have halved their digital spending to $2.3 million.’’

The SMI data also revealed where the software/services marketers have directed their extra digital advertising, with most of it going to quality content sites (58 per cent), programmatic exchanges (+129 per cent from a smaller base) and social media (+93 per cent also from a small base).

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