NZ Ad Market Delivers Record Ad Spend In May

New Zealand’s media agency market continues its stellar start to the new financial year by reporting another month of record ad spend in May with the total value of media investment up 6.2% year-on-year to $99.2 million.

And that has meant the NZ ad market continues to deliver record levels of investment over the first five months of the calendar year, with the total value of advertising investment now 8% above the total for the same five months last year and six per cent above the previous record period in 2017.

SMI AU/NZ Managing Director Jane Ractliffe said NZ seems to one of the few ad markets immune from the more cautious view being adopted in other countries.

"It’s quite incredible to see such a strong level of continued growth within the NZ ad market as we’re clearly not seeing any impact from rising inflation or any of the global issues that are creating uncertainty in other markets," she said.

Ractliffe said the most recent updates to SMI’s Australian and US ad spend databases indicated softening ad demand in May, but the NZ market was clearly bucking that trend. 

"In NZ we’re continuing to see the market underpinned by key product categories reinvesting post COVID, and this month it’s the Airlines/Travel Agents category which more than doubled its media investment compared to May 2021, and at the same time Government Category ad spend remains at record levels, up 40% year-on-year in May," Ractliffe said. 

This month the strongest performing major media were Digital (+20.1% YOY), Radio (+11%) and Outdoor (+16.7%). But traditional Television ad spend fell back by 6.8% as more investment instead went into Digital Video-based campaigns (+28.5% YOY). 

This brings the market’s growth over the first two months of the financial year to a healthy 9.7% with the value of Digital media bookings up by 22.8%, Radio investment up 17.4% and Outdoor ad spend up 9.9%.

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