SMI’s Expanded NZ Product Category Ad Spend Data

SMI’s commitment to product development has now seen us add significant improvements to our New Zealand data, with the refinement of key categories resulting in eight new product categories made available from the September data release.

Each of the travel, automotive and banking/finance categories – which are consistently among NZ’s five largest-spending categories – were improved by being split into more discrete and valuable data pools.

And these have yet again highlighted never-before-seen differences among key verticals, with the differences within the travel category especially interesting.

With the former travel category now split into two new categories: tourism/accommodation/travel products and airlines/travel agents/websites we can now clearly see how these growing categories create differing media plans.

While both are strong supporters of the free-to-air TV and pure content sites media in New Zealand, from that point their media plans vary markedly.

The larger airlines/travel agents/websites category has its next largest spend with social networking sites and is also a large supporter of national radio.

In contrast, the tourism/accommodation/travel products segment has dramatically grown its search spend in the past calendar year, making it a larger media for these advertisers than the next largest of posters/billboards, while social networking ranks as its third largest.

But the one common element among these categories is they are both on strong growth trajectories, with the airlines/travel agents/website category growing ad spend 24% in the latest CYTD to $46.3 million and tourism/accommodation/travel products lifting spending 38.4% to $10.3 million.

More detail on the key media sector splits and growth trends for these categories is shown on the charts below.