Cannes, Marketer CEO/CFO Commentary, Accenture Song's Business Results Vs. HoldCos, And US TV Upfronts Deconstructed
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for June 22, 2024
Before the newsletter, a last call for anyone in Paris on Sunday June 23, 2024 who would like to join in some or all of our annual Chocolate Marathon (for context please see this site). We’ll start at 10:45am and likely go all day until 7pm local time. Please email brian@madisonandwall.com for more information.
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As the world’s biggest advertising event of the year draws to a close, attendees to the Cannes Lions are often asked about the highlights of the event or significant learnings. As in most years, there wasn’t anything overly significant announced at or leading up to the Lions that one couldn’t learn about or experience elsewhere. Instead, the most important thing is the annual reminder of the importance of people and relationships to the success of any business. When (and not if) something goes wrong, knowing someone you can call and trusting that they will get back to you is as critical as it ever was. With every passing year, it seems likely that Cannes will sustain its growth and provide more and more of these opportunities to develop and maintain key relationships.
This is, at least in part, because the biggest media companies in any one country who were all different 20 years ago are now mostly the same, at least outside of China. Ad tech companies and other providers of data, software and services often see similar opportunities from going wide. As these entities continue to outpace the growth of companies focused on individual markets, they will continue to accrue more resources. In part because of this international growth, when they look to prioritize trade marketing budgets, the advantages of global events become very compelling. At the same time, perhaps because the event is not hosted in the United States, Cannes appears to be more accessible to non-American companies and professionals (especially Europeans) which then makes it more likely that people from the US will continue to travel there for the efficiency of seeing other individuals from so many other places.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world outside of Cannes continued, and some of it was chronicled in our published research. First, ahead of the Lions we summarized recent commentary about marketing and advertising activity from CEOs or CFOs at each of Capital One, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, L’Oreal, Mondelez, P&G, Stellantis and many others. Next, Accenture reported their latest earnings, indicating accelerating growth for Song, their nearly $20 billion-annual-revenue agency-adjacent business. We provided data tracking their quarterly growth over the past several years, juxtaposed against trends for the largest traditional agency holding companies. Finally, in light of much chatter about the US TV upfront marketplace in Cannes and a number of press articles on recent negotiations, we provided some historical data and frameworks that help explain why the upfronts don’t necessarily tell us much about current advertising trends or the TV industry, either.