The ad spend canary is clawing back the losses of 2020.
Media agency bookings for television have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to industry insiders.
Early SMI (Standard Media Index) numbers, not yet released publicly, suggest metro television ad spend up better than 40% against April 2020.
April last year was the first full month to feel the impact of COVID-19 and ad spend in the same month this year would be expected to be substantially higher.
However, industry insiders say the numbers show that ad spend in April 2020 tracking slightly higher than in the same month in 2019.
April programming this year included the NRL on Nine, AFL on Seven and the Masterchef Australia season launch on Ten. Nine also had Married at First Sight and Lego Masters.
Outdoor media, hit the hardest by pandemic measures, also came in strong in April with growth of more than 40%, albeit against a dark period in 2020.
Bookings across all sectors were up better than 20%.
Some of the strong advertiser categories include travel, banks, food and healthcare.
Strength in forward bookings continues.
Jane Ractliffe, SMI AU/NZ managing director, writing in a blog, says the total for May is just $900,000 below the total for all of May 2020.
She says the market needs to make back the $730 million that evaporated between April and June period in 2020 to return to its June quarter 2019 total.
That represented a 34.3% fall in the market’s total June quarter ad spend, and was the first year since 2016 that the quarterly total ad spend was below the $2 billion mark.
“When we look back at the categories mostly responsible for that huge decline we can see the bulk of those lost revenues – just over $400 million – were attributable to seven key product categories,” she writes.
The largest fall of more than $100 million was in the automotive brand category due to severe vehicle supply issues caused by the pandemic.
“And that level of decline remained consistent until the end of last year before the category showed the first signs of beginning to stabilise,” she says.
For the March quarter its total was down just 7.6%, or $11 million. She says this suggests auto may soon be contributing to the advertising market’s growth. In the early April data its media investment was just $1.8 million below that of April 2020.
A large contributor to the March quarter 2020 drop was travel, which fell $96 million last year but is up 98% in the early April data due to surging demand from airlines and the domestic tourism subcategories.
Most of the categories reporting the largest declines last year are showing positive growth, while many of the 30 plus other SMI categories are also already reporting higher ad spend in April and May.
“Thankfully the SMI data is finally providing numerous positive signs about the market’s future growth,” says Ractliffe.
“And given the future spend already booked in the system, it’s a fair bet that the market will return to 2019 levels sooner rather than later.”
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