Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary
A new ranking of the world’s 20 largest sellers of advertising for 2023 as well as analysis of news and data related to TikTok, Publicis, RTL and Mirriad for the week ending March 16, 2024
On Monday I published an interview with the CEO of Mirriad, Stephan Beringer to talk about their in-content advertising platform, opportunities that will help marketers make greater use of television in the future and some of the history of branded entertainment (this interview was published in partnership with Mirriad and is available on a complimentary basis on my free Substack site).
Stephan was, of course, very well known across the industry for his leadership roles at Publicis in the 2010s, and I wrote about them this past week as well. The agency group made a small, but potentially strategically important acquisition of a consulting firm called Spinnaker SCA, which may be part of their broader efforts around retail media and retail marketing
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Meanwhile, European media company RTL reported its full year 2023 results, and with this data we have data on the bulk of the major European broadcasters for last year. When compared with European results from the significantly larger global digital platforms, RTL’s results and those from their peers continue to reinforce my view that TV is losing significant share of marketers’ budgets there as they are in the US and in most of the rest of the world.
Illustrating this further, with RTL’s numbers now in, I also updated my estimates for ad revenues from the world’s 20 largest sellers of advertising for 2023. While we can see than a wider-than-widely-appreciated-group of companies are taking a growing “share of wallet”, sellers of traditional TV advertising are not among the industry’s beneficiaries. Corporate subscribers can reach out to me for detailed data sets with quarterly revenue estimates back through 2017.
Source: Madison and Wall, Company Reports, GroupM
Speaking on one of those beneficiaries of shifting wallet shares, with news this week that the US House of Representatives passed legislation that would either ban TikTok or force Bytedance to sell its US (and maybe global) operations, on Thursday I joined Bloomberg TV (here starting at the 1:08:10 mark) for a segment to talk about potential scenarios going forward.
Finally, I wrote about the passing of Gerald Levin, the former CEO of AOL Time Warner in a piece I called “the Distinction Between Being Wrong and Being Early Is Often Indistinguishable.” Much of what was envisioned by that combination – synergistic ad and content sales – is being realized now, but only because it’s possible to buy different kinds of ads and engage with different kinds of content on digital platforms in a much more meaningful way now vs. 24 years ago.