Media agencies have recorded a fifth consecutive year of growth in bookings across four of the seven media channels, according to SMI figures.
Strong results in digital (up 14.2% to $1.84 billion), outdoor (up 7.9% to $823.6 million) radio (up 5.6% to $582.2 million) and cinema (up 0.5% to $7.1 million) contributed to a 1.1% bookings increase to $7.11 billion. The figures exclude IPG Mediabrands agency bookings.
The largest contributor to agency bookings is still television, despite a 3.8% drop in bookings to a touch over $3.09 billion.
Newspapers also had a sharp 7.1% drop to $504 million and magazines fell 17% to $170 million, but both channels have a high proportion of direct sales, which are not accounted for in SMI's figures.
SMI’s category data shows government spending, fuelled by the federal election and census advertising, did the most to buoy the market in 2016, up $80.9 million, while health care reported the highest growth of 67.9%.
“Australia’s media remains one of the most innovative in the world, with our media companies continuing to find new and improved ways for advertisers and their Agencies to reach audiences,” SMI Australia and NZ managing director Jane Schulze says.
“As a result we’ve seen key product categories such as automotive brands, retail, food/produce/dairy and travel all increase their marketing budgets in the past year and most of those have also grown their advertising spend in December.’’
December down
December 2016 results show a year-on-year decline of 6.6% to $457.7 million before late digital bookings are received.
By channel, capital city TV was down 4.4%, regional TV is up 4.2%, pay TV was down 8.9%, digital was down 15%, but expected to reconcile close to 2% down with late bookings.
Radio was up 10.7%, driven by Christmas retail ad spending, cinema was up 8%, outdoor was up 2.5% while magazines dropped 6.6% and newspapers were down 24%.
Ten achieved its highest monthly share of the commercial TV station revenue for several years with 27.1%. This was behind Nine's 39.7% (down from 42.1% YOY) and Seven's 33.2% (up from 32.8% a year ago).
“We achieved our best monthly SMI revenue share since June 2012, which is a great result and one that reflects the rising popularity of the KFC Big Bash League, Ten’s ongoing audience growth and the success of our partnership with Multi Channel Network," director of revenue and client partnerships Rod Prosser says.
"The result is even more impressive when you consider we had 11 BBL matches in December last year compared with 14 in December 2015.”
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