Australian advertising market dipped in 2024: Guideline SMI
The total value of agency bookings in Australia last year fell by 0.9%, despite strong year-on-year growth in various sub-sectors.
This is according to the latest Guideline SMI report, which showed record market share for both digital and outdoor media, and double digit growth for cinematic advertising.
Guideline SMI APAC managing director Jane Ractliffe said agency bookings “continued to highlight key trends in the media market”, pointing to a 17.8% jump in streaming services and a 17.4% increase in digital radio spend.
“The growth in ad spend to video/streaming sites also delivered another consequential metric as our digital data shows video-based campaigns overtook display as the largest ad format for the first time in CY2024, with the value of video-based campaigns growing 12.4% while the display total fell 3.4% on CY2023,’’ she said.
“Retailers – and in particular chemists – drove a lot of the growth in video-based ad spend across all digital sectors, along with food/produce/dairy and toiletries/cosmetics advertisers.
“Within the latter, video growth from the skin care subcategory delivered most of the gains within the toiletries market.’’
The December market fell 7.2% year-on-year, despite a 67.5% increase in government ad spend from the same month in 2023, due to the upcoming election. Government spend was up 18.2% in 2024, compared to 2023.
“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 Federal election in May this year,” Ractliffe said.
Retail remains the highest-spending category, followed by auto brands, and insurance companies.
Digital grew 4.4% overall in 2024, with social media up 9.4%. Linear TV spend dropped 9.5%, regional TV fell 3.2%, and radio ad spend slipped 3.4%, with regional radio falling just 0.3%.
“Outdoor’s growth of 4.9% this year has seen it hit a record ad market share of 15.4%,” Ractliffe continues, “and 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 bookings up 18.4% this year and insurance campaigns up 41.4%.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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