Page 7 - AdNews Mar-Apr 2021
P. 7

                 Editor’s Letter
  The year of opportunity for media
2021 is shaping up as the year of media. As the new year opened and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 started fading, recruiters noticed a few changes. More permanent roles were emerging in the advertising and media industry.
Industry insiders reported fewer contracting roles, generally suggesting
that the industry is using
in-house resources to the full.
Opportunities are there but it’s early days and It will take a while to reveal ongoing themes.
And the big media compa- nies — News Corp, Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media — are about to receive large lumps of unbudgeted revenue this year.
The deals with Google and Facebook, after long negotia- tions (backed by the Australian Government) on payment for news, will go a long way to keeping premium content alive, and present opportuni- ties for advertisers and brands.
Market analysts are all forecasting a lift in ad spend this year.
Macquarie puts growth of
the metro free-to-air TV advertising market at 20 per cent-plus in the six months to June this year.
This would bring the financial year ad market to 94 per cent of pre-COVID-19 levels, using the 2019 financial year as a reference point.
So sometime next year, the TV ad spend will return to that 2019 point and continue on before hitting a flat point in 2023.
But this year is about growth.
Standard Media Index (SMI) numbers show the rush to secure TV bookings for the holiday sales helped end
a negative run for ad spend with November media agency bookings growing after 26 months of falls in a row.
And the rise has continued, apart from a lull in January during holidays without Australian Open tennis, moved three weeks later to February.
The rise is helped by the continuing move to digital from print, from increasing ad spend on free- to-air television, a firm grip on costs, and a return to the main game by advertisers following
the 2020 pandemic year. Among the companies ben- efiting from favourable eco- nomic tailwinds are News Corp
and Nine Entertainment. They are joined by Seven West Media, which has done well with programming, market share and is in better financial shape after taking
a large axe to debt.
And the nature of advertis-
ers is changing. According to Brian Wieser, Global President of Business Intelligence at GroupM, large tech companies have become major marketers in recent years.
A key factor supporting growth in the advertising economy has been the rapid growth of billion-dollar- per-year marketers, mostly companies formed in the past two decades following the initial dot-com boom. Amazon, Alphabet, Booking, Expedia, Netflix, Facebook, Uber, eBay, Wish and Airbnb spent more than US$1 billion on advertising in 2019. This fell by around 20 per cent in 2020. Will this start
climbing again this year? Most likely.
And with the coming of vaccination, smaller and
targeted industry events are a reality. The AdNews Brisbane Live event is scheduled for April 22.
  EDITOR
   CHRIS PASH
  www.adnews.com.au | March/April 2021 7
     



































































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