Record NZ adspend

AUCKLAND, Today: New Zealand’s media industry has shattered previous adspend records for the financial year, lifting 19.2% from the prior year to move through the $ NZ1.1 billion mark for the first time, according to the latest from Standard Media Index.

SMI, which collects and aggregates actual ad payments from all of NZ’s major media agencies, has now reported consistent year-on-year growth in every one of the past 12 months as the market has moved strongly out of the covid period.

And that higher demand continued into March with the value of total ad spend lifting 3.5% to another record level for any March month, driven by stronger demand for the digital and radio media.

Sydney-based SMI AUNZ MD Jane Ractliffe said the result reflected the strong level of consistency now evident in the market following the huge disruptions during the covid period.

“New Zealand’s ad market has not only been rebuilding since covid, but it’s also entered a new period of stability as there’s been year-on-year growth in monthly adspend for 17 consecutive months,” she said.

“Now the ad market has followed the economy in learning to live with covid, and that ensures more certainly for all media stakeholders.”

“And to have now broken through the $ 1 billion market for the first time in a financial year really is an extraordinary turnaround from the dark days in mid-2020 when the impact of the pandemic was at its peak.

“Now the ad market has followed the economy in learning to live with covid and that ensures more certainly for all media stakeholders.”

The government category again emerged as the largest in march with total adspend soaring 42.5% year-on-year with retail adspend the second largest category, up 7.6%.

March quarter adspend has also broken all previous records, with the total up 6.4% as digital media adspend soared 14.8% and radio bookings grew by 10.8%.

And for the financial year, the value of NZ’s adspend grew 19.2% to $ 1.1 billion with digital media bookings lifting 26.1%, TV adspend growing 10.9% and bookings to utdoor media increasing by 28.2.

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 gency adspend across all major media, media sectors, 30 product categories and 100 sub categories. Its NZ data covers more than 95% of all agency spend and SMI works with media agencies in 15 global markets.

• www.standardmediaindex.com