Radio Advertising Market Rises by 3% in First Half of 2023

From IMJ Adworld August 8th (but we’re not surprised, it’s flying on Admatic) :

The Irish radio advertising market continued to enjoy revenue growth in the first half of 2023 with total spend increasing by 3% to €76.5m according to figures published by Radiocentre Ireland. According to the figures, the first quarter of 2023 performed better with total spend up by around 6% for the first three months of the year. In the second quarter, however, the market was a little more challenging with revenue flat for the period.

According to Radiocentre Ireland, the €76.5 million revenue was made up of €59.6m in spot advertising, a 1% increase on the same period last year. Branded content, including sponsorships, content solutions and partnerships, rose by 5% to €13.6 million while digital audio revenues for the period amounted to €3.3m, an increase of 40%. However, this figure does not include revenues generated in the Irish market by global audio players like Spotify, Acast, Soundcloud.

The Radiocentre Ireland figures also show that the largest category spender on radio during the first six months was the retail sector followed by finance, government spending and the motoring with the latter in particular up 28% on 2022. Other sectors that reported strong growth included pharmaceuticals (+18%), travel and transport (+17%) and B2B (+11%).

“It is great to see further growth in radio revenue following on from such strong revenue growth in 2022,” says Ciaran Cunningham, CEO of Radiocentre Ireland.

“The JNLR listenership data confirms that radio enjoys huge audience numbers with 91% of Irish adults and 87% of 15-34-year-olds listening to radio every week,” he adds.

“Radio also delivers for advertisers according to recent research published by dentsu U.S. in partnership with Lumen Research, which measured attention to various audio formats. The research revealed that radio drove higher attentive seconds per thousand impressions compared to other digital, social and TV benchmarks,” Cunningham says.