The advertising market continues to be soft in the second quarter, with April’s total ad spend down 5.6% year-on-year, according to Guideline SMI.
Reduced ad spend affected all major media, except for news – the only channel to experience growth. While newspaper spend fell 6.6%, digital grew 18.2%, leaving news with overall growth of 1.8%.
The decline for TV (-10.4%) and radio (-5.7%) slowed – in March, the channels fell 14.6% and 8.1% respectively.
Both outdoor and digital declined, but on a smaller scale: by 1.5% and 2.4%, respectively.
Guideline SMI APAC managing director Jane Ractliffe said this month, smaller product categories were responsible for most of the decline, with the 10 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 others, with the US, UK, and Canadian markets all reporting strong growth in April.
“Australian ad demand is very much out of sync 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.
Ractliffe noted that as more late bookings come into the Australian database, the year-on-year decline is 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.”
Across the financial year-to-date, the Guideline SMI data shows the total market to be back just 1.7% from last year’s record level of ad spend.
See also: Ad market falls 6.6% in March, 3.7% in Q1: Guideline SMI