Digital drives ‘mindboggling’ adspend recovery

SYDNEY, Today: New Zealand’s advertising market has continued in March to rebuild from last year’s Covid collapse, reporting a healthy year-on-year increase in adspend of 8.8% to $ 93.1 million – fuelled mostly by stronger demand for digital media.

Digital strongly outperformed the broader market by growing adspend 37% with standout performances from the digital sectors of Social Media (+78%), the Programmatic market (+52.4%) and Search (+17%).

Television adspend was also stronger (+3.4%) and Outdoor reported its first month of growth since the Covid crisis began, with total bookings up 3.2% to $ 14 million.

Sydney-based SMI AU/NZ MD Jane Ractliffe said: “The market is now moving into a strong recovery period in which huge levels of growth will be reported given the large declines evident at the same time last year.

“We’re now heading into unchartered territory as we’ve never before seen such massive growth in adspend and expect to be reporting record levels of growth over the next few months – but of course it’s coming from an extremely low base.

“In NZ, SMI’s Forward Pacings data already shows strong April demand with confirmed ad bookings already 39.5% higher in April (ex-Digital) with Outdoor bookings doubling and TV adspend already up 42%.

“We’ve never before seen such massive growth in adspend.”

“We’re starting to see some growth rates for key product categories that are truly mindboggling, with early April adspend for quick service restaurants already up 320%, auto brand adspend up 115% and insurance adspend up 97%.

“And SMI’s media and advertiser subscribers with access to our Forward Pacings data can track exactly where this renewed ad spend is heading.

“And the stronger demand continues into May, with SMI already reporting a 25.7% increase in adspend [ex-digital] over May 2020 with Outdoor bookings already up 35.8% and bookings to Magazines lifting by 75%.

“But in March it was again Retail advertisers that drove most of the higher demand with bookings up 22.3% while the Specialty Retail category reported growth of 23.5%. The Food/Produce/Dairy category also reported healthy demand (+25.2%).

“But the largest increase actually came from the Utilities/Fuel/ Energy category (+65.6%).

“For the March quarter total NZ media agency spend is now up 4.9% after reporting two months of consecutive growth with strong growth from categories such as Utilities/Fuel/Energy (+45.5% over the quarter), Food/Produce/Dairy (+14.7%) and with the Restaurants, Cosmetics and Insurance categories all reporting double-digit gains.

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. It allows subscribers to monitor and analyse key data points that can be actioned to grow share and make better investment decisions. SMI works with media Agencies in 15 global markets.

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