Government advertising spend, ahead of the federal election, has switched to digital, according to industry analysts.
And political parties are watching from the sidelines, ready to light the ad spend fuse as soon as a national poll date is known.
Australians will head to the polls in the first half of 2025, but the exact date of the next federal election is yet to be announced by prime minister Anthony Albanese.
Guideline SMI, which aggregates media agency booking data, shows government spend up 70% in December 2024 compared to the previous year, with the political parties yet to make a move.
In December, 46% of government ad spend went to digital media.
“Within digital they mostly use automated digital campaigns, but the second largest spending area for government is social media,” Guideline SMI APAC managing director Jane Ractliffe said.
Government spend grew by $100 million in the five months to the election in May 2022.
Political parties, industry, associations and unions spent an extra $55 million over the same period.
While 35% of all government ad spending was allocated to digital media and 22% to traditional TV, political parties spent 67% of their budgets on TV and only 15% on digital platforms.
Ractliffe said the same is expected for this year.
“If you go back 10 or 20 years most of the spend would have been on TV,” she told AdNews.
“Now it's a more fragmented market, so there's lots of other options and the government is using a lot more social media than they have in the past.”
The Australian government has spent north of $692,000 on advertising through Meta since December.
Meanwhile, Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots has pledged to spend more than $100 million in the lead up to the election.
Market analysts see upside in the advertising market from recent updates from Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media show promising signs in the advertising market.
“Traditional media are uncertain of the impacts of an April/May Federal election,” analysts at Macquarie write in a note to clients.
“Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media have seen some early election advertising spend, but the June quarter remains unclear.”
Media players report a relatively small start to election spend.
Seven West Media’s latest trading update noted an improving advertising market with the March quarter tracking low single digits above last year. And Seven will benefit this half from AFL growth and ad spend during the federal election.
“We're really positive about the state of the industry from an audience perspective, and I'm hoping we're finally starting to see that reflect the ad market conditions,” CEO Jeff Howard told analysts in a briefing.
The media group in the half year to December reported a “soft” advertising market resulting in total television revenue dropping 6%.
Nine told the market that total TV ad revenues expected to grow in the high-single digits March quarter but it was too early to estimate the June quarter “given limited visibility”.
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