Tuesdata: Starting the financial year backwards

Tim Burrowes

September 2, 2025 4:32

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.

Back in July 2024, the first six days of the Olympics provided TV with what now looks like an artificial boost. The stellar performance of local rights holder Nine appeared to be at the expense of its TV rivals Seven and Ten.

A year on, what is much clearer is that the Olympics did indeed pull advertising spend into the market. Nine didn’t just win a share game, it dragged extra spend into the market as a whole. And that was despite the market being down that month too.

What we now know is that the quadrennial effect was to pull levels back up from what would have been even worse decline.

SMI’s July 2025 numbers – which cover agencies’ spend – demonstrate how chilly things are for the whole market without the Olympics.

The overall advertising market was down 12.2% in July. We thought July 2024 (which Guideline reported as down 7.8%) was a new normal. Turns out it was the good times.

Television, which includes streaming by the way, was down by 17.3% this July. SMI has stopped breaking that number into broadcast and streaming. I wonder whether that’s to avoid being accused of crying fire in a crowded theatre.

Meanwhile, the news market sank too – down by a painful 20.4%. That covers both printed and digital news mastheads. Magazines were off by 18.8%. Ouch.

Radio was off by 14.7%. Digital spend was down 10.9%. Also ouch.

Even the usually resilient outdoor sector was down 7.9%.

Only cinema advertising, coming up from a much lower base, was on the up, by 32.6%

Before you freak out entirely, it’s worth remembering that SMI is only a snapshot – it covers media agencies only, not direct spend.

And as bookings arrive ever later, and overstretched agencies get sloppier about keeping their data up to date, SMI tends to upgrade its numbers later on. So the chances are things aren’t quite as bad as that 12.2% fall suggests.

SMI also hints at August looking a bit better. With much of the data not yet in, it said that it currently sees early August bookings as having already reached at least 80% that of last year.

And of course, the state of the wider economy is the main indicator of future ad spend. Tomorrow we see the gross domestic product figures for the June quarter

I also gather from industry sources that media mix modelling platform Mutinex is seeing a wider economic hit of an average fall of 5% in raw sales volume over the last 12 months.

Those LA Olympics can’t come soon enough.