Advertising spend, as measured by media agency bookings, fell 6.3% in August but Olympics broadcaster Nine Entertainment and outdoor partner QMS cleaned up.
Nine achieved a second month of Olympic-related growth with its August agency revenues up 32.3%, buoyed by huge growth at both its linear TV and digital streaming.
QMS, the official outdoor partner of the Olympic and Paralympic teams, reported an 11.3% increase.
The August data features slightly more days of Olympic broadcasts (11 compared to the seven in July).
Guideline SMI APAC managing drector Jane Ractliffe said the Paris Olympics had again created an abnormal month for ad spend as bookings moved to the Olympic sponsors.
“Both NEC and QMS reported huge growth due to their Olympic associations, while the more than doubling of ad spend to Nine’s streaming sites also had the added impact of delivering a record level of August ad spend for Video ad format-based campaigns,’’ she said.
“The ongoing growth of streaming TV services is continuing to challenge display inventory’s historic dominance among the key digital ad formats for which we report ad spend, with Video ad format spend now just $30 million below that of Display so far this year.’’
Among the other major media, Cinema easily outperformed the market with revenue growth of 58.2% while traditional magazine spend was up 8.9%.
However, total digital ad spend is so far back by 10.6% (or by 11.5% if digital spend related to traditional content is reassigned to it) but Ractliffe said she expects that to improve.
“As the market is currently very short we’re seeing a longer than usual delay in some digital campaigns being paid, so we are expecting the digital decline to improve and as that happens there will also be a small improvement in the current total market decline,’’ she said.
And she said if the market was viewed with digital ad spend removed, the underlying year-on-year decline is a lower 2.8%.
The strongest growth came from the government category (+33.4%) while both household supplies and utilities increased their spend by more than 20%, while the largest decline came from the restaurants category (-24.2%)
For the calendar year-to-date the data shows the market is back just 1.3% but outdoor (+5%), digital (+2.8%) cinema (+8.8%) and magazines (+8.4%) are all in positive territory.
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