Total SMI spend falls with index blaming Easter and 2015 NSW state election
Even outdoor advertising slipped in the latest SMI numbers for March
Media agency spending numbers for March have taken a hit compared to last year after The Standard Media Index released its first report following the withdrawal of IPG Mediabrands earlier this week.
Metro free-to-air advertising spending has dropped by 16.3% in March compared to the same period last year while digital advertising, a perrenial growth area, also dropped by 5.7%.
The year-on-year March figures have been affected by an early Easter and the impact of the NSW election last year.
Seven remains the most dominant network, holding its position just ahead of Nine with a 37.6% share of the free-to-air market against Nine’s 37.2%.
Ten saw its revenue share grow 3% to 25.2% for the period.
The across-the-board decline included radio, which dipped by 6.8% and the the out of home sector which also saw a drop of 1.8%
The impact of the withdrawal of IPG Mediabrands from the index has been a hotly debated subject over the past week since it was announced.
SMI said the decision by IPG to leave came after the two groups could not agree on a global approach to measuring spending.
SMI co-founder and managing director of Australia/New Zealand Jane Schulze said that the withdrawal was disappointing but would not have a significant impact on the business or the veracity of the numbers, with Mediabrands removed to report like-for-like numbers.
“We have really enjoyed working with them and are disappointed we couldn’t come to new terms, globally,” Schulze said.
While the loss of IPG Mediabrands has been a blow at a global level, SMI has had some recent local success with the addition of Nine Entertainment Co. which had refused to subscribe t the service under previous sales boss Peter Wiltshire.
SMI has also claimed a number of other local wins which it says has insulated the business from the impact of the IPG move.
Industry observers have also noted that the local impact of the withdrawal of IPG could be affected by the outcome of the current Coles media account review that could see $200m worth of spending come back into the index if the account moves.
Simon Canning
Correction: The original article incorrectly reported Ten’s revenue share as having dropped.
SMI has never quite got there as a metric and now the unsettling patterns of actual ad spend is starting to bite. This recent data might be a sign of something ugly coming our way. Certainly not good for the big media.
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SMI has lossed its relevance for Digital. With circa. 10%-25% of publisher revenues delivered programmatic and other 3rd party monetisation platforms that is not included in reported revenues how can it still be a worthwhile benchmarking tool? Working in a couple of the reported pubs, we’ve consistently seen SMI reporting -XX% when we know we’ve grown XX%+. SMI also combines Agency Trading Desk revenues with DSPs in their “Exchanges” revenues and doesn’t include all DSPs or Trading Desks in this nunber. Time to innovate or die, SMI.
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Dear Anonymous Commentators,
SMI sources its data directly from the media Agency payment systems, so it’s real payment detail that we report each month. Before SMI started media’s stakeholders had zero visibility on how ad demand was tracking on a monthly basis. That’s even more important now as media is becoming increasingly complex and global. For example, when SMI started seven years ago in Australia there were no free-to-air multi-channels, Agency Trading Desks, social websites or audio websites but as Agencies started buying ads on these new media we received the bookings and incorporated them into the SMI data set. On Digital, SMI reports on what the Digital publishers’ own sales teams have sold and a separate ATD figure as that’s how the Agencies buy those ads. Meantime, SMI continues to reinvest in the media industry by creating the systems to provide the same robust data in other countries around the world where no monthly ad spend detail exists. Jane
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