Market delivers 2.5% growth – despite lockdowns

AUCKLAND, Today: NZ’s national marketer ad market has overcome some significant hurdles to report ongoing growth in ad demand in October, with the total lifting 2.5% year-on-year to $ 101.9 million despite ongoing lockdowns.

SMI AU/NZ MD Jane Ractliffe said (from her Sydney base): “Although the result dented the six-month trend of consecutive months of double-digit growth, the total bookings were nonetheless $ 1.8 million above the total recorded in the pre-Covid world of October 2019.

“Among the major media, the strongest overall result came from Digital where ad spend grew 14.9% to but on a percentage basis both the Magazines and Cinema media reported higher percentage gains (up 24.6% and 81% respectively).

“The positive result was a huge achievement given the abnormal prior-year growth.

“It’s never easy to deliver growth when the same month the previous year was abnormally inflated by a one-off event, but the New Zealand market has clearly risen to the challenge posed by last year’s election and this clearly demonstrates the high level of underlying demand in the market,” she said.

“The NZ ad market is also reporting strong growth over the first 10 months of the calendar year with the total up 23.8%.”

“Despite the election-related growth last year, NZ’s Government category again delivered further growth in October (+5.2% YOY) to emerge again as the market’s largest-spending category while the market was also buoyed by strong growth in Retail investment with both the Retail and Specialty Retail categories delivering double-digit growth in the lead up to Christmas.”

Ractliffe said the October month was also notable as Digital adspend again overtook the value of Television ad spend, with the growth mostly due to a huge increase in Display bookings (+56% YOY) while SMI is now also seeing much larger growth rates in the emerging Digital Audio space (+90% in October).

“The New Zealand ad market is also reporting strong growth over the first 10 months of the calendar year with the total up 23.8% to a level more than $ 20 million above what was invested over the same 10 months last year.

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, 41 product categories and more than 140 sub categories.

• www.standardmediaindex.com