Cinema, outdoor and digital media were the only bright spots to emerge from an advertising slump in January which has seen print and TV hit hard and major marketshare movement between the top five online players.
Telstra’s chief marketing officer Mark Buckman told an AANA congress yesterday that uncertainty was plentiful in the media and marketing sector and it meant Telstra was extracting significant discounts in media rates. GroupM chairman John Steedman told AANA delegates that the media market was more short-term than he had seen it in many years.
Fairfax Media’s 30% crash in metro masthead revenues in January was partly offset by its digital operation, which was the only online publisher to post revenue growth last month among the top five, according to SMI.
News Ltd’s metro print mastheads were down 14.9% and its online unit also contracted 8.2%. Ninemsn posted the biggest decline of the top five online publishers with an 11.5% drop and a loss of 2.3 share points. Yahoo!7 was off 7.4% and Telstra’s online advertising revenues declined 10.9%. Fairfax Media’s digital revenues were up 12.9% and with a gain of four share points to 26.1% of the online display ad market. It is now trailing marketleader, Ninemsn, by two share points, ahead of Yahoo!7 which has a 25.5% share and News Ltd with a 16.2% share.
More broadly the weak state of the ad market inflicted pain on TV broadcasters in January, with an overall 11% decline over the same period last year. The only bright spot was for Seven Network, which while posting a year-on-year decline, pulled a staggering 43.8% share of the metro TV ad market, leaving Nine with a 33.7% share and Ten with 22.5%.
What has concerned TV broadcasters in the latest SMI figures is that pay TV was also on the back foot in January, down 1.6%, typically a strong month for the medium. MCN executives have told some market players that revenue grew upwards of 3% in January, in contrast to SMI’s January numbers. But MCN chief executive Anthony Fitzgerald would not comment, saying "that’s the figure”.
Some TV executives remain concerned about February with another year-on year decline expected although they point to a possible lift in April.
Val Morgan chief executive Damian Keogh said although cinema advertising had lifted strongly in January, the overall market contraction “was not good for anyone”.
“We should remember there was still quite strong growth in January last year and there was a little bit of growth in February and March, which then started to really hit in April last year,” he said. “I think we might see some growth in April, May and June of this year but there is a confidence issue going on.”
Steedman said GroupM's trading was being affected by a higher proportion of global clients in its stable who were holding back their spends because of global uncertainty.
MCN’s Fitzgerald said: "Generally electronic media is in good shape for the longer term. This is just a short-term scenario. I think we’ll see it pretty tough until the end of the financial year but I expect a better second half.”
Outdoor was the other good news story in the bleak January SMI figures - it was up 7.6%.
Magazine revenues were down 19.7% overall led by Pacific Magazines with a 32.2% drop, although even Pacific’s rivals can see there was an anomaly in Pacific’s reporting for January, because of the timing of some editions which were not included in the January figures. NewsLifeMedia posted an 18.4% fall in revenue in January followed by a 14.4% decline for ACP and an 11.8% drop for Fairfax Magazines.
Regional TV was off 2.9% and radio down 1%.
Media owners cautioned that SMI numbers only accounted for media agency bookings and that some discrepancies would emerge when direct sales force numbers were included.
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