Sydney, Australia – Following the conclusion of the 2022 Australian federal elections, new data from IAB Australia and PwC reveals the dominance of political and government ad spending in the digital advertising space locally for the first quarter of 2022, reaching a value of $3.449b–an increase of 19.2% on the same period in 2021.
The political and government ad spending scene reached a 13.5% share of the general display market for the quarter, up from 3.9% in Q1 of 2021. By contrast, retail experienced the largest decrease in share, dropping from 16.4% to 13.5% share of general display advertising.
Meanwhile, all general display categories recorded growth on the previous year, with video advertising increasing 24% to reach $715.1m for the quarter, infeed/native by 5% to reach $349.80m, standard display by 11% to reach $167.7m and other advertising by 69% to reach $21.5m.
Lastly, spending on classifieds and search & directories grew quarter on quarter, increasing 4.3% and 3.6% respectively while general display advertising seasonally contracted by 15.1% as it does each year. Interestingly, search & directory spend in the quarter seized share from general display advertising as the recovery of travel accelerates.
Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia, commented, “The digital ad market saw solid investment growth for the March quarter compared to the previous year with the standard slight seasonal decline from the December quarter. The make-up of the top advertiser categories was greatly disrupted by significant ad spend from the political parties and independents early into the campaign for the Federal Election.”
