2Q24's Google, Comcast, Televisa, IPG, Havas, ITV, TF1, M6, JC Decaux Results. Plus, More Top 100 Marketer (Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Ford, LVMH, etc.) Commentary

Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for July 27, 2024

In a very busy week for the advertising industry, earnings results were partially over-shadowed by the news that Google was no longer going to deprecate third-party cookies and instead would “elevate user choice.”   As we wrote in our analysis of the news on Monday, Google’s actions will inevitably provide some extra time to marketers, open web publishers, ad tech companies and anyone else who still relies on cookies to adapt how they do what they do, but the long-term trends favoring platforms and publishers with logged-in users likely remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, we wrote about second quarter 2024 results released by many of the world’s largest marketers who reported last week. The generally positive CEO and CFO commentary was summarized in a note we published on Friday.  Looking at Coca-Cola, Nestle, Unilever, Colgate, LVMH, Ford, Stellantis, AT&T, Kimberly-Clark, Kering, Capital One and others shows the majority conveying that their spending on advertising continues to expand at a solid clip. We’d add that such outcomes are aided by a healthy underlying economy (which accelerated in the US during the second quarter, in nominal year-over-year terms according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis)

We could arguably see the general trend towards budget growth in global and regional data from Google, at least to the extent that its growth is probably coming in ahead of the overall advertising market by a modest degree.  At least some of this continues to be funded by shifts of budgets away from television, which we can see in negative underlying advertising results for Comcast as well as its cable operator peer Charter.  Fellow broadcast network owner Televisa Univision fared better, but their results are likely somewhat anomalous.  By contrast as we wrote on Friday, in Europe most of the region’s largest broadcasters are posting very strong growth right now. But then again most have very easy comparables from the year-ago period, and most are barely at levels of ad revenue observed five years ago, prior to the pandemic.  In other words, much of their growth can still be characterized as “recovery.” This kind of recovery is also helping some outdoor media companies such as JC Decaux experience its own robust growth, although unlike television, outdoor advertising is not in secular decline.

Perhaps the solid growth in television in Europe is helping agencies, as most of the industry’s largest players seem to be faring relatively well in the region.  That’s not quite the case for agency trends in North America, at least for IPG and Havas (who reported results this past week).  The same is likely true for WPP, who will report second quarter results next week.  After they do we’ll have more comprehensive information about the broader sector during the quarter.