The Australian advertising market ended the 2024 financial year with a 1.6% decline in spend on last year's record totals, according to the latest data from Guideline SMI.

Guideline SMI APAC Managing Director Jane Ractliffe said the fact the financial year total was the second highest on record showed the market’s underlying strength.

"If you view Guideline’s ad spend data over a longer-term period, you’ll see the market is now up 4.5% on the pre-COVID financial year and that represents an extra $376 million of ad spend that’s come into the Australian media economy since that time,’’ she said. ``But obviously the composition of media shares has changed considerably over these years with Digital now representing close to 40% of all ad spend and Outdoor hitting 15% of all ad bookings in the last financial year.’’

For the month of June, ad spend was down 1.1%, marking the smallest monthly decline this calendar year.

The month saw a mixed bag of results across different media sectors, with Outdoor, Digital Video, Digital Audio, Digital Magazines and Cinema media reporting growth of 14.2%, 7.7%, 10.1%, 18.5% and 22.3%, respectively. Meanwhile, Digital was down 2.8% overall, TV fell 4.8%, radio down 1.6%, news publishing down 14.2%, and magazines down 23.9%.

Ractliffe said: "Outdoor is clearly the media of the moment as it’s delivered record levels of ad spend for the June month, the second quarter, the calendar year-to-date and financial year periods.’’

The biggest trend in June was a significant increase in ad spend from Streaming TV companies, while Online Media groups reduced their ad spend by a similar amount. The decline in Online Media ad spend contributed to the lower June quarter ad spend, which was down 2.4% despite stronger demand for Outdoor, Streaming TV, Regional Radio and Press.