The outdoor industry had reason to be cheerful at the start of the year. While other traditional media posted gloomy 2011 advertising numbers, it was sunshine and roses for out-of-home which saw ad revenues rise by 3.4% to $494m year-on-year.
Figures from SMI figures which measures the spend of all major media agencies, proved even more positive for outdoor. After digital, which saw ad revenues increase by 16.5%, outdoor saw the second largest increase of 7%, followed by radio's 6.3%, TV's 1.3% and huge declines for newspapers (-12.3%) and magazines (-13.4%).
Eyecorp's CEO Mike Tyquin, who departure from the company was recently announced says, "Whereas everyone else has finished the year basically flat we've gone ahead a couple of percentage points."
Charmaine Moldrich the CEO of Australia's Outdoor Media Association (OMA) concurs: "I wasn't surprised with the figures as we had been trending that way for a while… I'd like the market to be a bit more buoyant, but I'm very pleased. Even though we didn't post a huge increase in the December quarter, it's still the eighth consecutive quarter where we've posted an increase."
There is much discussion of the reasons for this success, with a few factors cited as catalysts: outdoor's foray into new technologies particularly those linked with mobile, fewer problems with audience fragmentation, and the knock-on effects of the introduction of audience measurement system MOVE.
A look to overseas markets also seems to strengthen the prospects for the sector as the global markets that have raced ahead with creative advancements in outdoor are now reporting an even brighter story.
BandT snapshot