The local Australian online advertising market has continued to grow, reaching $3.449bn for the quarter ending 31st March 2022, an increase of 19.2 percent on the same period in 2021 according to data from the IAB Australia Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER) prepared by PwC.
Within the quarter, the most significant shift in spending was unsurprisingly around the Federal Election, resulting in Government being elevated to the number one advertiser category, representing 13.5 percent share of the general display market for the quarter, up from 3.9 percent in Q1 2021. By contrast, retail experienced the largest decrease in share, dropping from 16.4 percent to 13.5 percent share of general display advertising.
All general display categories recorded growth on the previous year, with video advertising increasing 24 percent to reach $715.1m for the quarter, infeed/native by 5 percent to reach $349.80m, standard display by 11 percent to reach $167.7m and other advertising by 69 percent to reach $21.5m.
Spending on classifieds and search & directories grew quarter on quarter, increasing 4.3 percent and 3.6 percent respectively while general display advertising seasonally contracted by 15.1 percent as it does each year. Interestingly, search & directory spend in the quarter seized share from general display advertising as the recovery of travel accelerates.
Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia commented: “The digital ad market saw solid investment growth for the March quarter compared to the previous year with the standard slight seasonal decline from the December quarter. The make-up of the top advertiser categories was greatly disrupted by significant ad spend from the political parties and independents early into the campaign for the Federal Election.”
The share of content publishers inventory bought programmatically grew by 1% on the immediate prior quarter bringing it to 42 percent of spend, equal to the percentage of agencies buying by IO, while direct bookings remained relatively stable at 16 percent.
