Jane Ractliffe at AdNews Adelaide L!VE.
Falling ad spend in Australia and New Zealand may be due to moving budgets from big global brands and a decline in share prices.
Data coming from the Standard Media Index (SMI) in April will provide the remapping of national spend.
SMI partners with all the global media agencies and independent agencies to accumulate its data.
Speaking at AdNews Adelaide Live, Standard Media Index APAC managing director and co-founder, Jane Ractliffe, said that Australia looks too expensive for global brands to appoint ad spend here.
“The big global brands in the US, UK and France, look at the APAC marketing budgets and from a CPM perspective, they got too expensive,” Ractcliffe said.
“The brands look at India, Indonesia and Malaysia and can reach higher audiences at a much lower cost. With the return on investment, the sales are likely to be bigger in those markets.
"So a lot of multinational ad spend has been moving out of Australia and New Zealand and into other APAC markets.”
The total global ad spend is expected to grow in the next year, with much of the data leading from US markets, according to SMI.
There is still a massive appetite for traditional media, whether it's television, outdoor and radio. Sporting events are a primary driver of total ad demand, particularly for TV.
The programmatic market is consolidating, with 78% of all spend now going through four DSPs globally.
“When a new technology starts, you have multiple new players in the market. They've all got their new way of doing it. But globally, it's starting to consolidate, so they're getting a lot more pricing power," Ractliffe said.
“And this is showing in the global programmatic spend for the past three calendar years. In 2025, it started to decline for the first time.
“Like many new media, because programmatic has only been around maybe 10 years in a reasonably sophisticated form, it's now properly grappling for budget with all the other different types of digital media that are out there.”
Growth in video has also drove the growth of programmatic ad spend globally and in Australia.
Streaming growth is starting to slow due to its significant size in digital media.
Podcasts are also becoming a larger share of the total digital advertising spend.
Ractliffe said that one major change in the US is the rise of outdoor advertising.
“The US lags significantly outdoor because it is a highly fragmented outdoor market,” she said.
"You would have to make 20 phone calls, 20 different negotiations to do outdoor across the 50 states.
“Whereas if you're doing an outdoor campaign here, you can go to one of four major providers.
“But programmatic outdoor is changing that, and there is some consolidation happening. Digitisation is impacting that as well.
“One of the key trends that we're expecting to see next year is some outdoor growth begin to emanate out of the US.”
In Australia, 2025 saw the total market back 1.7%, seeing particular movement in traditional and digital media spend.
“Digital is starting to flatten out. There's pockets of growth, particularly in streaming TV, but other areas like programmatic and search have got to a point where they're so large that it's hard to get much extra growth,” Ractliffe said.
Outdoor has grown 6%, making Australia the country with the highest share of outdoor spend in any market.
This has been supported by programmatic outdoor buying and MOVE 1.0.
Ractliffe said outdoor will continue to grow with the incorporation of MOVE 2.0.
Streaming is still continuing to grow, with the largest streaming service in Australia often being Seven, Nine or Foxtel over YouTube.
Streaming sites scored the largest amount of growth from a dollar perspective, with the inclusion of Netflix, Amazon Prime and Samsung advertising into the national market.
"Cinema had a flat year, occasionally you might have had a 20% growth, but overall the market was back 1.7% and it's been a few years now since we've had a growth year, and we were really hoping that it may happen in 2026," Ractliffe said.
“Social media is now the largest sector. This is the first time that social has emerged as the largest and it's not necessarily because of the growth it's got, but that the other sectors have fallen.”
There has been a decline in programmatic ad spend.
“Australia is a standout in terms of the growth that we see here, although relative to the US, we're small, but the growth rate that we have is well above what we can see in many other markets,” Ractliffe said.
“It pains me every month to put out the data and see declines when you know there is so much amazing ad inventory out in the market, but we're being impacted by global factors."
AdNews would like to thank our sponsors: Audience 360, Blis, Carat, Nine and One Solstice Network as supporting partners; Boomtown, Foxtel, Jarvis, OMD Adelaide and Listnr as associate sponsors and; Co-Curators AADC and AMC and Friend of AdNews IMAA.
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