Outdoor has accelerated past newspapers in total media spend, with newspapers continuing to haemorrhage red ink against a broader uplift in agency bookings.
Media buyers are spending 1.8% more than they were in January last year, with $467.01 million in media placed last month. Print-based mediums continued their decline while digital continues a meteoric rise.
The stats come from the latest Standard Media Index release, which tracks media bookings each month.
The leading categories by January ad spend were:
- Television – up 2.4% year on year to $222.82 million
- Digital – up 9.7% year on year to $96 million
- Outdoor – up 3% year on year to $49.76 million
- Newspapers – down 17.1% year on year to $42.69 million
- Radio – up 7.9% year on year to $36.91 million
- Magazines – down 14.7% year on year to $9.32 million
- Cinema – up 10% year on year to $6.8 million
Television
Still the largest medium by advertising spend, TV grew by 2.4% year on year with a total spend of $222.82 million being allocated, but below trend growth in metropolitan TV will give pause.
Metro TV grew by 1.3%, with $159.18 million placed by media buyers in key markets.
Meanwhile, there was above trend growth in regional TV with a monthly spend of $40.71 million a 7.7% increase year on year.
Digital
Digital was the fastest growing category for the month with growth of 9.7% year on year to book $96 million of agency dollars.
Within digital, social networking grew by 60.1% year on year with a monthly spend of $6.4 million.
The biggest-spending category of digital was content sites, with that category growing by 4.6% to $35.3 million.
Video and mobile vendor categories grew by 38.5% and 24.3% respectively.
The only two categories in digital to decline year on year were exchanges and ad networks.
Newspapers
It was red ink across the board for newspapers, with a whopping 17.1% contraction year on year.
Metro newspapers suffered an 18.4% drop to $22.9 million, while the regionals fared a little better with a 10.4% drop to $9.09 million, although a double-figure decline is hardly cause of celebration.
Outdoor
A demonstration of both growth in outdoor and a decline in newspapers is that outdoor now has a higher media spend allocated to it than newspapers.
Outdoor grew by 3% year on year to make $49.76 million in the month of January.
Last January, media agencies spent $51.51 million on newspapers and only $48.30 million on outdoor.
How times change.
Radio
Radio was a bright spot for legacy media, with it booking a 7.9% increase in media agency dollars for the month to $36.91 million spent.
While metropolitan radio stations attracted the lion's share of the dollars, regional radio positively boomed.
In fact, it managed to grow its agency booking by 51.7% for the month, up to $7.76 million.
Magazines
Magazines continued the slide for paper-based mediums, with consumer mags reporting in with a 20% drop year on year to $6.57 million.
Newspaper magazines also declined, down 4.9% to $2.14 million. However, one bright spot was that trade magazines enjoyed an uplift of 32.4% to $602,008.
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