NZ Online Advertising Turnover 2008
The New Zealand online industry is in good heart with all sectors of advertising expenditure recording YoY growth at a combined growth rate of 43%.
Display Advertising was up 38% against full year 2007, 20% up on same quarter 2007, but flat on Q3, as anticipated due to the traditional drop off in the last week of December. All data courtesy of IAB PwC Insight Report 2007 and 2008.
Already some trends are becoming evident. Display adspend growth slowed in 2008 compared to the rocket that was 2007 (the first year data on gross adspend received by NZ online publishers was provided to, and audited by, PwC) but continues its annual climb at the expense of other media sectors.
Quarterly analysis is useful for forward planning. We’re starting to see that Q1 drops on previous quarter, due to light January revenues. Q2 is the biggest growth quarter (up 30% in ‘08 and 44% in ‘07). Q3 gives solid growth as new marketing spend is released and wisely chooses online over traditional offline media. Q4 remains flat on Q3 due to Xmas (odd, given the growth in interactive retail advertising last year) before dropping back in Q1.
In the Oct-Dec quarter of 2008, spend from Government campaigns was up 3% (this growth is unlikely to continue in 2009) and finance sector online advertising were down by a whopping 5.8%, demonstrating the impact of finance companies going broke combined with a reluctance by trading banks to advertise mortgage rates as credit tightened. The automotive sector drop of almost 1.8% was partly seasonal but also recession-related.
It is expected that the financial sector will bounce back to be the leading industry category in the Jan-Mar first quarter of 2009 due to increased mortgage & card activity, travel will hold up as airlines invest to move national and international seats (along with the national launch of Jetstar), government spend will decline slightly as the keys to the various coffers are progressively locked away and telecommunications sector advertising will remain steady but expect big growth in Q2 due to a lift in mobile spend and continued agressive broadband investment.
A final note, on search. This online sector progressively declined quarter by quarter from $15.13M in Q1 down to $14.57M in Q4/08. I wonder if this is why Google is not replacing its New Zealand Country Manager?
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February 26th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
And when the New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) figures are released, advertisers will see that Online was the only media to increase in 2008.
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:35 pm
@Gavin - I saw in The DominionPost today (Monday 2nd March Business section) that a figure of 8% was quoted for Interactive share for 2008. If this is true (the ASA industry turnover figures have not been released yet), then that’s good growth for online in the past year. I recall television spend was around 1% decrease so I wonder if any other sectors will see a rise?
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
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