NZ decline slows

SYDNEY, Friday: The NZ media industry has continued its recovery from the depths of the Covid-induced market declines, with media agency bookings for August back 18.1% and early September figures suggesting an even smaller fall in that month, according to global ad expenditure analyst Standard Media Index.

SMI AU/NZ MD Jane Ractliffe, who’s based in Sydney, said: “The SMI results highlight the speed in which the market is recovering, with the August decline less than half that reported during May – the month most impacted by Covid, when the market demand fell by 37.5%.

“The market is now being underpinned by very strong demand from government advertising with Covid and election-related adspend driving a 94% increase in spending to $ 9.5 million in August.

“And this takes the category’s growth over the calendar year-to-date period to $ 64 million, a 41% increase over the same eight months last year.

“Despite that, all major media continued to report lower revenues in August with the digital media reporting the lowest fall of 9.9% followed by television where adspend reduced by 13.2%.

“The market also continues to strengthen, with September bookings looking even stronger.

“Given the huge influx of extra advertising around the Rugby World Cup last September it’s hard to compare this year’s September bookings to those abnormally high revenues, but we can certainly see that compared to the previous year’s September bookings the market is so far only back 18%.

“And that data was extracted a few days before the end of the month so there’s more adspend to come, plus there’s all the late digital advertising spend that will come through. Given that the September decline look as though it will be closer to 10% or even less.

“The market is now underpinned by very strong demand from government-related advertising.”

New insights
“This month SMI has also introduced more ad insights with the market’s first view of product category adspend shown across all major media.

“This data provides the first insights into how individual categories are spending on traditional and digital media, with SMI also publishing that data across all digital sectors and ad formats such as online video, display and online audio.

“For the first time advertisers can now gain accurate share of voice analysis across not only all major media but across all major media owners, including all digital owners,” Ractliffe said.

“And as we can dissect the data by sector it means that category spending onto large groups like Google can be split further into the sectors of search, programmatic and video sites (YouTube) to reflect the various parts of Google’s business.

“This new category/owner data highlights how adspend trends and media shares significantly vary even among similar product categories.

“These new category/Owner insights are a premium service and are available for all the 90+ product categories for which SMI reports NZ adspend.”

About Standard Media Index
Standard Media Index 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 adspend across all major media, media sectors, 40 product categories and 140 sub categories. .MI works with media agencies in more than 15 global markets.

• www.standardmediaindex.com