Australia’s media agency market continued to deliver stronger underlying advertising demand in July, with the headline decline of 4.2 per cent mostly due to last year’s Tokyo Olympics but with that excluded the rest of the market grew ad demand by 2.8 per cent.
Total July ad spend is back $27.9 million from last year’s record July 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 growth of 2.8 per cent.
SMI AU/NZ managing director Jane Ractliffe said the underlying growth seen in July meant the Australian ad market has now delivered 30 consecutive months of year-on-year growth. “At least within the advertising market we’re not yet seeing any significant signs of nervousness in the current economic environment,” she said.
“And this is an especially solid result as for the first time in three years we’ve seen the first signs that Government category ad spend – which has powered a lot of the market’s growth – is starting to normalise from the COVID era with the value of its bookings back 35 per cent this month. But other categories have stepped up to fill the void and as a result we’re seeing good growth on an underlying basis.”
July has been an especially strong month for the Outdoor media as its growth rate of 28.8 per cent was the highest for any media and ensured the media delivered total ad spend that was 2.5 per cent higher than its pre-pandemic result of July 2019.
Total Digital ad spend grew just 0.1 per cent, mostly affected by the lower Video Sites/Streaming ad spend. But it’s also clear that the value of video-based campaigns across the market continues to grow with the Video total now just $2 million below that of the online Display ad market in July.
Product Category trends are also moving quickly, with the Government category delivering the largest decline of any category this month and that affected all major media. However, that fall was almost offset by soaring Travel category bookings with that category’s total more than doubling year-on-year.
And for the January to July period the market remains well in record ad spend territory with the value of the ad market up 8.6 per cent on the same period last year.
