Tuesdata: Starting the financial year backwards
Welcome to Tuesdata, written for Unmade’s paying members. Everyone else will hit a paywall further down.
Today: Are those July Guideline SMI numbers as bad as they look?
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Media is missing that Olympics ad spend
Back when he was the respected boss of WPP (rather than the slightly devalued founder of S4), Sir Martin Sorrell regularly prognosticated on the quadrennial effect - the spending boost to the global economy every four years catalysed by the Olympics and the US presidential race.
The irregular electoral cycle in Australia has a less noticeable effect with political parties which are nowhere as profligate in their marketing as their US peers. And although there’s plenty of evidence that government spending on public information campaigns rises as the election draws near, even that isn’t at a level to make the weather for the advertising market on the upside; more noticeable is the hit when the election is called, the government goes into caretaker mode and the sugar hit stops. We felt that back in April.
Similarly, it’s now nine years since we’ve been what could be characterised as a totally normal Olympics cycle, as far as the local ad industry is concerned.
Covid interrupted the flow in 2020 with the Olympics delayed by a year, and we’re only now beginning to get the real picture of the contribution the Games made in 2024.
Yesterday’s new set of monthly numbers from Guideline SMI offer a painful comparison one year on.