Total online advertising in Australia continued to slow in the second quarter of 2020, falling 12% year-on-year, but the full financial year total held steady at A$9.1bn.
However, video was the outlier for the quarter, outperforming other channels with no change in year-on-year expenditure and an increase in general share to 53%.
Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia commented: “The headline number is not a surprise as we anticipated a tough quarter for the industry. Within this, however, video is proving to be extremely resilient and holding steady year-on-year. We are also seeing retail, government and technology experience the largest increase in share compared to the previous quarter.”
The IAB Australia Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER), compiled by PwC, shows the impact of COVID-19 on the digital advertising market, following 3.8% of growth in Q1.
All online advertising categories showed declines compared to the quarter ending June 2019 with search and directories down 9%, general display 11% and classifieds recording the steepest decline at 22.7%.
The shift to programmatic advertising reached a new peak according to the report with 44% of all advertising on content sites bought programmatically, compared to 41% from agencies using insertion orders.
The percentage of inventory bought directly from advertisers decreased to 15%, while the bulk of content publisher’s video inventory (65%) was bought programmatically in the June quarter, up 9% from the previous quarter.
The top five industries were impacted by the decline in spend for the quarter, with real estate and entertainment falling from the top five, while media and technology moved in alongside retail, automotive and finance. The retail sector experienced the largest increase in share quarter on quarter, while the travel sector experienced the largest decline.
The top five industry categories for the financial year were automotive, retail, finance, travel and real estate. Retail and technology experienced the largest increase in share (up 1.3 percentage points), whilst automotive experienced the largest decline in share (down 5.7 percentage points).
Sourced from IAB Australia, WARC
