Happy Holidays from the team at Starship! Season’s greetings, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, and all that jazz. It’s been an interesting year. We’ll be back in January, and will leave you with an excerpt from this interesting Guardian article with regards to UK Christmas period advertising, some of which is relevant to Aus:
The 1% year-on-year boost in TV ad spending expected in the fourth quarter will mark the first growth since the second quarter of last year, when the Brexit vote triggered a weakening in the economy that has resulted in advertisers tightening their belts for the best part of the last 18 months.
“The market has struggled this year but, as a medium, the ability of television to drive sales in the crucial fourth quarter remains undiminished,” says Phil Hall, chief commercial strategy officer at media buyer MediaCom UK, whose clients include Tesco.
“Marketers don’t have the luxury of holding back spend at Christmas: it is too important to retail businesses to be cutting spend in the same way they have done for the rest of the year.”
[…]
Christmas TV advertising has traditionally been dominated by retail brands such as M&S and John Lewis, but in recent years digital rivals such as Amazon and eBay have turned to television too. Thinkbox, the industry body that promotes TV advertising, says retail brands are being supplanted by online businesses as the biggest spenders.
The online business category – which Thinkbox defines as spending by online-only brands as well as the marketing of online services by traditional businesses – includes companies such as Amazon, Confused.com, Facebook, Google, Just Eat, Netflix and Purplebricks.com. It is expected that online businesses, which combined will spend almost £700m on commercials this year, will remain the biggest spending category of TV advertiser and one of the few that will show year-on-year growth.
See you guys next year!