2024's Most Popular Research: A Year in Review
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for January 4, 2025
Each week on the M&W Podcast, we discuss Madison & Wall’s latest research and walk listeners through how the advertising business works. Episode 16 of the Madison & Wall M&W Podcast is now available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We have also recently launched the Agency Business podcast focused on the business of agencies in collaboration with Olivia Morley’s FusionFront Media. In our most recent episode, Olivia and I interview Forrester’s Jay Pattisal to discuss the Omnicom-Interpublic transaction and implications across the industry. Click here to listen now. New episodes are available on Mondays.
Weekly work
We mostly took the last couple of weeks off, as did much of the industry evidently, given the dearth of news beyond some significant personnel changes at TikTok, Horizon Media and Integral Ad Science, all announced on Friday
So for this first publication of the year we thought we’d review the most popular research we produced for our paid subscribers, which included more than 200 separate pieces of work ranging in length from a few hundred words to a few thousand. The heaviest levels of consumption related to the looming TikTok ban, the pending Omnicom-Interpublic transaction and our observations and analysis on advertising and marketing spending trends from the world’s largest marketers.
More Context
For purposes of this note, we are focusing on research produced during the second half of 2024 as the larger readership base provides a better basis of comparison of popularity of topics (although the general themes that ranked highest were similar throughout the year).
Far and away, the most popular piece of research we produced – measured in terms of “views,” which includes sharing of research within organizations, was our November 7 note, “TikTok Banned in Canada + Implications for Google, Meta, Snap and Others”. Other pieces related to TikTok such as September 16’s “TikTok Ban Implications, Google’s Ad Tech Trial and the Nature of Digital Media Budget Flows” was among our top 10 most popular in terms of reach.
Looking at reach alone – which we think is the best barometer of appeal – the most popular piece we published in 2024 came out on December 8, when we wrote “Omnicom-Interpublic M&A Report: Analysis and Considerations”. That note was followed closely in popularity by another piece the next day, entitled “Omnicom and Interpublic Merger Announcement: Post-Call Observations.”
Our second most popular piece in terms of reach was published on October 23, when we wrote “Core Media Planning Paradigm and How Brands Grow Challenged,” analyzing an academic paper that critiqued the book (and philosophy behind) “How Brands Grow,” which is essentially canon for the advertising industry.
Next up was a review we published on December 5 based upon commentary provided by management teams at Nestle, P&G and Unilever at their capital markets days held in November. Analyses of commentary made by CEOs and CFOs also typically ranked among the most popular pieces we produced during the year with one of them inside our top 10.
The Nestle/P&G/Unilever document was followed by three different pieces, which each reflected a range of important topics that will have significant implications going into 2025.
On November 17 we wrote “Read Throughs on RFK Jr Announcement on Media Owners, News Industry and Agencies” which focused on the potential impact of President-elect Trump’s pick for the US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary on the advertising industry, given his views on pharmaceutical advertising.
On September 5 we wrote about the economic incentives pushing retailers into the advertising business with a piece of research entitled “Retail Media: Meaningful Impact on Operating Income Drives Ongoing Efforts to Grow Sector” highlighting company-specific and industry level profit margins and illustrating the contribution to those margins that advertising brings.
Next, ahead of Google’s antitrust trial in September focused on the ad tech industry, we did some digging into court filings and found some important documents with P&L data that hadn’t been unearthed by anyone else we were aware of (at least until we wrote about it).
Finally among our top-10 reaching pieces of research during the second half of 2024 was our October 2 report on “US Ad Industry Concentration Update + Top 50 Sellers of Advertising” which highlighted the increasing concentration of the industry among a growing number of globally oriented digitally-focused platforms.