Australia’s advertising market continues to defy pessimists and shrug off all economic challenges to report another month of underlying growth in August, with the headline dip of 0.9% transforming into the growth of 6.2% once the impact of last year’s Tokyo Olympics was removed.
Total August ad spend is back just $5.9 million from last year’s record August total, but when the media most affected by last year’s Olympic broadcast are excluded (Metropolitan TV and their related Pure Play Video or Streaming Sites) the market instead shows the growth of 6.2%.
SMI AU/NZ Managing Director Jane Ractliffe said: “The Australian ad market is proving itself to be incredibly resilient given concerns about inflationary pressures and growing interest rates. Even with the abnormal ad spend from last year’s Olympics is included the total ad spend in August is less than $5 million below last year’s record level, and incredibly it’s 13.4% above the pre-COVID total from August 2019,’’ she said.
“And we can clearly see that ad demand will also be higher in September as the ad revenues collected last week show the market total is already just 1.1% below that achieved in September 2021, and that’s also excluding all Digital ad spend, which will further propel market growth.’’
This month it’s the Outdoor media underpinning the Australian market, with its ad spend jumping 34.9% to a record August level as its growth accelerates out of the COVID lows. And Cinema also delivered strong August gains, with its ad revenues more than doubling in August.
But TV ad spend was back 11.1%, mostly due to last year’s Tokyo Olympics, as the broadcast only concluded on August 8.
The Olympics also affected Digital media, with the Video Sites sector back 15.6% due to the absence of the Olympic-inflated streaming revenues. Radio’s ad revenues also continued to grow, this time up 2.1%, and while print newspaper ad spend fell 24.6% (in part due to the Olympics) the News Media industry delivered the highest increase in related online revenues for the month with the total up 19.6%.
Among the Product Categories, Government ad spending continues to normalise, with the total back 35% in August, but that decline was mostly remedied by similar growth in Travel category ad spend.
The positive underlying August result has also ensured ad spending for the first eight months of the calendar year remains in record territory, with the total now up 8.5%.
