Total advertising demand slumped 13 per cent year-on-year despite a strong pre-Christmas boost from Retail advertisers the latest SMI Data figures have shown.
However, November 2015 was a tough month to replicate given it featured the largest spending ever seen in the history of SMI’s data. Added to that, this month there were two significant lunar month timing issues which meant SMI’s outdoor results are not like-for-like, and it was also a shorter month with one less Sunday and Monday.
As a result, all major media are so far reporting significant year-on-year declines with the only growth seen in the media sectors of regional TV (up 2.2 per cent), metropolitan radio (up 2.4 per cent) and programmatic trading (up 62.2 per cent).
And the softer market was despite strong pre-Christmas growth from the retail category, which emerged as the market’s largest this month after growing bookings 18 per cent over last November’s result.
But SMI AU/NZ managing director Jane Schulze said large declines in spending from travel, insurance, recruitment, media and automotive advertisers more than offset the optimism in the retail market.
“If the results are normalised for outdoor and the usual level of late digital bookings are received at month end, we would expect the final result for November to be back six or seven per cent,’’ she said.
“Even so it would still be only the second month this year in which we’ve seen lower year-on-year spending, but it is also the largest decline recorded in CY2016.’’
However SMI’s data shows the overall market to be flat over the financial year-to-date period, while for the calendar year thus far the Australian advertising Agency market remains at a record high having grown its total spend 1.2 per cent compared to the same 11 months of 2015.
