NZ adspend hits record August high

SYDNEY, Tuesday: New Zealand’s ad market has shrugged off higher inflation and last year’s broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics to continue to defy expectations in August, reporting an impressive 10.3% increase in media agency adspend to a record August total.

“And the result is even more extraordinary considering the fact the August 2021 ad revenues were only $ 1 million below the last record August figures reported in 2019,” says SMI AUNZ MD Jane Radcliffe.

“There’s no sign the current economic challenges are impacting ad demand, with SMI’s early data for September showing the total adspend already equal to last year’s September total (ex digital),” she said.

“The New Zealand ad market is proving itself to be resilient given concerns about inflationary pressures and global uncertainties. This is an incredible result, especially as more than a week of abnormal Olympics-related ad revenues are included in last year’s total.

“We can clearly see that ad demand will also be higher in September as the forward pacing revenues we collected last week are already of equal value to those booked for the whole of September 2021, and there were still five days of ad selling to go.

“And those forwards also exclude all digital adspend which will further propel market growth.

“The NZ ad market is proving itself to be resilient despite inflationary pressures and global uncertainties. This is an incredible result.”

“Despite the Tokyo Olympics usually creating an abnormal decline in TV spend in comparative periods, this month we’ve seen TV adspend lift 7.6% to $ 35.3 million.

“But the digital media remained the fastest-growing in NZ with the value of bookings lifting 19.3%, driven by strong growth in social media, programmatic trading and search.

“Outdoor media also continued to deliver strong adspend with the total increasing 16.9% in August while cinema adspend grew 82%.

“Among key product category trends we’ve seen another large decline in Government category adspend of 19% as spending from that category normalises post covid.”

Newspapers and magazines were also in negative territory.

But that decline was more than offset by strong growth from key categories such as specialty retailers (+34.9% yoy) and toiletries/cosmetics (+39.6%).

“SMI’s calendar year-to-date results for NZ reveal the ad market remains at a record high with total ad spend up 6.3%.”

SMI NZ: AUGUST 2022 AD DEMAND TRENDS

Digital: 19.3%
Television: 7.6%
Outdoor: 16.9%
Radio: 17.7%
Newspapers: -10.8%
Magazines: -7.8%
Cinema: 83.7%
Other: -44.2%
Total: 10.3%

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, 30 product categories and 100 sub categories. SMI’s NZ data covers 95% of all agency spend. SMI works with media agencies in 15 global markets.

• standardmediaindex.com