NZ adpend nears record total for September

SYDNEY, Today: New Zealand’s ad market has again defied the pessimists, reporting another month of double-digit growth with the total up 10.1% to be just $ 579,000 below the record level achieved in the pre-covid world of September 2019.

SMI AU/NZ’s Sydney-based managing director Jane Ractliffe said: “When further late bookings are received the market will again be delivering another month of record adspend.”

This month the Outdoor and Digital media have led the gains, with Outdoor bookings soaring 25.8% and Digital adspend jumping 18.9% mostly due to strong demand within the Programmatic and Social Media sectors.

Ractliffe said there’s no sign the current economic challenges are impacting ad demand, with SMI’s early data for October showing that 90.6% of last year’s total already confirmed with a week left to trade.

“New Zealand’s ad market continues to disprove the pessimists, with adspend already nudging a record level in September as Airlines and Insurance advertisers return strongly to the market and the Outdoor and Cinema media continue their extraordinary recovery from the impact of covid,” she said.

“The calendar year-to-date results are similarly robust, with the market delivering another record level of adspend.”

“The performance is even more extraordinary given the fact that Government category adspend continues to normalise back to pre-covid levels, and that’s seen more than $ 5 million leave the market just this month.

“But such is the broad level of ad demand across the market that decline is being more than offset from other categories growing their media investment.

“For example, both the Restaurants and Utilities/Fuel/Energy categories grew ad spend by more than 50% year-on-year.

“Among other major media, this month we’ve seen the Magazine media continue to grow with total ad spend up 19.9% and Television’s bookings lifted 3.1%.

“The further strong growth seen in September also contributed to a record level of Q3 bookings, with the total up 6.4% to $ 595.7 million, which is 3.8% – $ 10 million – above the record September quarter ad revenues achieved in 2017.

“The calendar year-to-date results are similarly robust, with the market delivering another record level of adspend with the total up 6.8% in this period.

About Standard Media Index
Standard Media Index was established in 2009 in Sydney and has offices in New York, London and Madrid. 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 NZ data covers more than 95% of all agency spend. SMI works with media agencies in 15 global markets.

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