EXCLUSIVE: Bloomberg is about to make its biggest push yet into the Australian advertising market with a dedicated local TV channel and a concerted push to attract advertisers to its local, upmarket audiences.
Although its professional service arm, centred around the Bloomberg terminal business, remains the company’s biggest revenue earner, Bloomberg Media – which now bundles TV, radio, online, apps and print products – has been growing at 30% per year globally from advertising. Similar growth plans are expected for Australia.
Financial services companies form the basis of Bloomberg’s advertising base but the company now has luxury goods, automotive, IT and travel brands in its sights. The most significant development is that a dedicated Australian channel will now allow corporates to advertise just to an Australian audience – until now they were part of a broader Asia Pacific feed which meant advertising messages were carried across the region.
Mark Froude, who heads media sales across Asia Pacific, said Bloomberg Media had been flying a little under the radar. “We’re becoming much more visible now,” he said. “Whether it’s Asia or Europe, for example, people are much more receptive to us as a media platform than they were one or two years ago. That’s largely due to the brand. It is a very high-quality brand, it’s highly accurate, it’s not biased, it’s influential but it is not trying to take a position on things. A lot of brands would like to have that level of association. Our audiences are more affluent and more influential than almost all other media out there in Australia, certainly on TV.”
He said ad revenues across the entire Bloomberg Media portfolio were rising 30% globally, including Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. “All categories are up, even our print revenues were up last year,” he said. “And it’s continuing this year although obviously some sectors are a little lumpier.”
Bloomberg TV, which is carried on the Foxtel platform, has about 50,000 viewers daily and the online portal tops 300,000 Australian users per month.
Connect Us Media, headed by former Time South Pacific regional director Bernie Newell, was appointed last year as Bloomberg’s media sales representative in Australia. Newell said although the local ad market was limp, he was upbeat for Bloomberg’s growth trajectory here.
“The volatility has been quite interesting,” he said. “It’s actually been a favourable development because we’re not in that retail or consumer goods area. We’re in those core financial areas and branching out into new sectors like travel and automotive and energy, which are largely unaffected by the day-to-day economics.”
This article first appeared in the 18 May 2012 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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