Australia closed 2024 with a flat advertising market, according to aggregated media agency bookings.
Guideline SMI today reported the total value of annual agency bookings to be down just 0.9% over the 12 months.
Digital and outdoor media gained record market share. Cinema also achieved impressive growth.
Video Sites/Streaming services recorded 17.8% growth adn advertising demand for digital radio soared 17.4%.
Video-based campaigns overtook display as the largest ad format for the first time in 2024, with the value of video-based campaigns growing 12.4% while the display total fell 3.4%.
Retailers, in particular chemists, drove a lot of the growth in video-based ad spend across all dgital sectors, along with Food/Produce/Dairy and Toiletries/Cosmetics advertisers. Video growth from the Skin Care subcategory delivered most of the gains within the Toiletries market.
For the month of December the market is down 7.2% but late digital booking numbers, held up by the Christmas holiday period, will likely reduce that.
Higher government category bookings are emerging as a key trend with spend up 67.5% in December.
"This further cements our expectations that stronger government category ad demand will be a key trend in the January quarter as those bookings continue to grow ahead of the expected hederal election in May this year,’’ Guideline SMI APAC managing director Jane Ractliffe said.
Higher government ad demand also buoyed the market across the year with that total up 18.2% to emerge as the country’s fifth largest product category.
Retail – the largest category – grew demand 0.9%ovber the year as bookings from the Chemists subcategory grew 16.6% to at least in part offset a 16% fall in ad spend from the Online Retailers subcategory.
Auto Brand ad spend was up 4.4% for the year while Insurers reduced their media investment by 3.3%.
Across other media, Digital grew 4.4% with Social Media (+9.4%) emerging as the next strongest sector after Video Sites;
Linear TV ad spend fell 9.5% (although Regional TV was back a lesser 3.2%) and similarly while Radio ad spend fell 3.4% Regional Radio was back a lesser 0.3%.
Outdoor’s growth of 4.9% this year has seen it hit a record ad market share of 15.4%.
"With our new visibility on Outdoor sector trends across all 150+ SMI product subcategories we can now see that large brand campaigns are driving demand in the largest Outdoor sector of Posters, with Bank Brand/Sponsorship bookings up 18.4% this year and Insurance Brand/Sponsorship campaigns up 41.4%,’’ Ractliffe said.
For the December quarter Australian ad demand was back 4.9% with Cinema reporting the only growth (+6.1%) but both Digital (-0.5%) and Outdoor (-1.7%) reporting below-market declines.
And for the first six months of the financial year the market is back 1.9% but with Digital up 2.8%, Outdoor up 2.3% and Cinema again delivering the strongest growth, up 10.3%.
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