Healthcare Ad Spend Surges in Q1: Emerges as SMI’s Fastest Growing Category

In the ever-changing world of media and marketing, there’s always surprises that emerge which require media owners and media agencies to remain alert.

At Standard Media Index, the payment data we receive directly from our media agency partners enables us to see and track these actual trends as they occur.

We publish two databases – media and category – in which we report the aggregated payment data each month. And in the former, for example, few would have expected the education category to emerge as the fastest growing in the last financial year. But in 2014/15 these advertisers grew their total ad spend by $49 million from the 2013/14 year.

Similarly, this year we’ve been closely watching the healthcare product category. Since January it has emerged from virtually nowhere to become the fastest growing of all SMI’s 38 categories in the first quarter of 2016.

It’s recorded quarter-on-quarter growth in ad spend of 161%, with its total ad spend jumping from $7.4 million in Q1 2015 to $19.1 million in Q1 2016.

And it’s spreading the extra dollars mostly across the media of TV, digital and press with its spend on metropolitan TV, for example, soaring 111% to $7.1 million for the quarter.

This SMI category comprises ad spend by public, private and community hospitals but also allied medical products and services.

SMI’s digital data breaks down further into these sub-categories to provide even more actionable insights, and here we can see the healthcare products/services sector is mostly growing is digital spend using search providers while also more than doubling its spend onto content sites and into the programmatic market.

In contrast, the hospitals sectors is focusing most of its digital spend on content sites, although this sub-category’s total digital spend is less than 10% of the full category total.

SMI provides media professionals with the data they need to be truly informed about the market in which they are operating.