SYDNEY, Sunday: Strong growth in Newspaper ad spend is the common early Covid-19 adspend trend across the Australian and New Zealand media markets, although total media market trends vary markedly in March, according to the latest report from Standard Media Index AUNZ MD Jane Ratcliffe.
“Australian media agency bookings are back 10.6% in March as a lower level than usual of late digital bookings failed to push the market into a single digit decline, as had been expected,” Ratcliffe said.
“However, if the figures were normalised for last year’s pre-election spike in political party/union bookings the market total is back 9.3%.
“But in New Zealand, media agency bookings grew 1.1%, giving that market its third consecutive month of growth.
“And as the first social restrictions began to take effect in late March we can see some evidence of the market reaction in these SMI figures, with the most obvious being the growth in newspaper bookings.
“Growth in Australian national newspaper bookings was the strongest in any media this month with the total soaring 30.2%, while in NZ total media agency bookings to newspapers lifted 35.7% – the highest March adspend since 2017.”
“In NZ, total media agency bookings to newspapers lifted 35.7% – the highest March adspend since 2017.”
Ractliffe said as the pandemic hit, the NZ media was in a stronger financial position than Australia’s as NZ’s media has recorded a 4% increase in financial year adspend while in Australia the market is back 6.6% over that period.
“This context is important as going forward we can see future confirmed bookings in NZ are already slightly above that evident in Australia, and that stands to reason as confidence in the NZ media market has been at a far higher level for the past nine months,’’ she said.
For the month of April, SMI’s Forward Pacings data shows that with a week of trading still to go the value of adspend in the Australian market in April was 57% of that achieved in April 2019 (excluding Digital) while in New Zealand the value of confirmed media was 59.7% of that reported in April last year.
“Those figures suggest that in both the Australian and New Zealand media markets we should see declines in media Agency bookings of about 30% in April, although the final results won’t be known until we collect more data in just over a week’s time,” Ractliffe said.
“SMI already has some good visibility into the media markets for May, with 31% of the value of NZ’s May 2019 adspend already confirmed and 28% of Australia’s May 2019 bookings guaranteed even before the trading month has begun.
“In NZ, adspend from the Other Financial Services category is already 40% above that recorded in May 2019.”
“And we can see many product categories are already showing bullish levels of media investment in May, suggesting the market looks set to improve on the April results.
“In Australia, advertisers in the Household Supplies category have already guaranteed 91% of last year’s total investment for May, and in NZ adspend from the Other Financial Services category is already 40% above that recorded in May 2019,” she said.
Also this month, SMI has unveiled three new premium Retail product subcategories: Supermarkets/Convenience Stores, Alcohol Retailers and Shopping Malls/Operators, bringing the total Retail-specific categories on which SMI reports to nine.
Ractliffe said SMI was now working on new breakdowns for Domestic Bank adspend, with six new premium sub categories to be released in May. They are: Brand/Sponsorship, Consumer Banking, Business Banking, Institutional Banking, Home Loans and Savings/Deposits.
About Standard Media Index
SMI was established in 2009 in Sydney and has offices in New York, London and Madrid. SMI partners with leading global media buying agencies to provide independent, accurate and timely advertising expenditure data to its clients to facilitate informed analysis of the media sector and product category expenditure. Data is sourced directly from advertising agencies’ billing systems and then aggregated to show the combined picture of media agency ad spend across all major media, media sectors, 40 product categories and 133 Digital product categories.
Share this Post
