Hold the Gloom! Detailing The Market’s Stronger Product Categories

In this guest post, SMI managing director Jane Ractcliffe (pictured below) says it doesn’t need to be all doom and gloom and says some categories are set to shine – toilet paper aside – in these tumultuous times…

Amid all the uncertainty currently permeating our advertising market, it’s important to provide a balanced perspective on advertising demand.

Yes, total advertising demand does remain lower in Australia, and most expectations are that the coronavirus will delay the expected return to overall market growth.

But that certainly does not mean there are not product categories that are already showing evidence of stronger demand for the month of March.

SMI’s latest Australian Forward Pacings data shows that when digital bookings are removed (as they are mostly paid for retrospectively rather than in advance) total Agency bookings for March are already 58 per cent of their March 2019 total. And note this data was collected even before the March month had begun.

SMI collects Forward Pacings data (confirmed future advertising payments for the future three months) which enables our subscribers to see how future advertising demand is tracking across all Product Categories.

And for the month of March we can already see categories such as food/produce/dairy are already showing strong demand for advertising with 96 per cent of their March 2019 total ad spend already booked.

Similarly, bookings in the toiletries/cosmetics category are already 88 per cent of last year’s March total and the alcoholic beverage category has confirmed bookings equal to 94 per cent of last year’s total. And ad spend from the non alcoholic beverages category is already above that seen in March 2019.

And as the accompanying graph details, future bookings for the Domestic Bank category are already tracking ahead of the market in both Australia and New Zealand.

In New Zealand, we’ve seen a far more positive outlook with total January ad spend up two per cent mostly driven by stronger Radio advertising.

But the total future ad demand in New Zealand for March is slightly below that seen in Australia at 53 per cent.

Even so we can still see strong future bookings among individual product categories with real estate advertising already at 81 per cent of the March 2019 total and both the government and toiletries/cosmetics category well above the market with 63 per cent of their total inventory already booked. And advertising demand from domestic banks is also already tracking ahead of the market.

SMI’s Future Category Demand data will be further updated next week when the first published data for the month of February is released in both markets.

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