Advertising spend, as measured by media agency bookings, was 5.6% weaker in April, continuing a soft market into the calendar year's second quarter.
The SMI (Standard Media Index) numbers show reduced demand across major media.
The decline for TV (-10.4%) and radio (-5.7%) eased. Outdoor fell 1.5% and digital 2.4%.
Cost of living issues are showing clearly in the numbers with advertising spend down for travel and restaurants.
Analysts had expected a slow start to 2024, and a pickup in the second half, but the numb have proving weaker than expected.
Guideline SMI APAC managing director Jane Ractliffe said the smaller product categories that were responsible for most of the decline, with the ten largest product categories collectively only reducing ad spend by 2.6%.
"There’s been some strong growth among large categories this month with the Auto Brand market continuing to return to pre-COVID levels with growth of 10.4% in April, while the Toiletries/Cosmetics category grew ad spend an astonishing 21%,’’ she said.
"But we’re also seeing the cost-of-living issues impacting ad demand as travel category ad spend has fallen 15% YOY in April.
"Gambling ad spend is back 19.6% and Restaurant ad spend is back 13.6% all due to a 64% fall in revenue from the Food Delivery subcategory.’’
Ractliffe also said the Australian ad market continues to differ significantly from that elsewhere, with the US, UK and Canadian markets all reporting strong growth in April advertising demand.
"Australian ad demand is very much out of synch with similar sophisticated ad markets as in the US in April we reported growth in ad demand of 9.5% YOY, in the UK the growth was 3.8% and in Canada it was 7.2%,’’ she said.
But as more late bookings come into the Australian database we’ve seen the decline in ad demand across the calendar year reduce to just 1.9% with both Digital (+4.8%) and Outdoor (+3.4%) in positive territory.
"As the market is so short it’s taking longer for some ad spend to come through, and that’s especially the case for Digital media as we’re now seeing that for March the level of programmatic and social media bookings has continued to grow significantly since the last data release,’’ she said.
And across the financial year-to-date the Guideline data shows the total market to be back just 1.7% from last year’s record level of ad spend.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.