Commerce Media, E-Commerce and Services Sales + National TV 2Q24 Trends And The (F)Utility of Upfront Data; SafeGuard Privacy/IAB Interview

Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for August 24, 2024

Nearing the end of August, there’s not a lot of new news, but there’s always new economic data and a lot of aggregating data from the recently completed earnings season.

This past week we wrote about Commerce Media and Tuesday’s new US Census Bureau data covering 2Q24 e-commerce sales which showed deceleration for most sub-categories of retail (which include general merchandise, food and beverage, motor vehicles, electronics and many others).  Relatively modest growth in e-commerce activity can be juxtaposed alongside decelerating growth in commerce media advertising, which we estimate grew by 17% year-over-year during 2Q24, a slower pace than the 20% rate of growth posted during 1Q24.   This pace was likely driven by packaged goods companies such as Coca-Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Clorox, Kimberly-Clark Mondelez, Nestle and others (during 2Q24 the aforementioned group increased global spending on advertising year-over-year by between “high single digits” and 26% on revenues that ranged between declines of -6% and growth of 5%).

interestingly, we found that Services spending grew by 6.4% during 2Q24, about the same as e-commerce did during the second quarter, according to a separate release provided by Census on Wednesday.   With an annualized revenue base of $22 trillion, services industries are three times bigger than all of retail, and to the extent we’re looking for important underlying trends in the economy, we’ll always see it more clearly in sales of services rather than in sales of goods through retail channels.

Tailwinds supporting the broader advertising economy to high single digit levels weren’t enough to help TV in the quarter, as we calculated that nationally-oriented sellers of professional video content (i.e. broadcast and cable networks as well as CTV, excluding YouTube) still declined during 2Q24.   As we contrasted actual ad revenue growth rates for the medium with claims made during last year’s Upfront market, we showed that once again any data coming out of Upfront press releases or other commentary from media owners essentially tells us nothing about actual business trends.

Finally, we published an extended interview with SafeGuard Privacy’s Richy Glassberg and Michael Hahn of the IAB and the IAB Tech Lab to talk about the IAB Diligence Platform and privacy laws impacting digital advertising, which you’ll hopefully find well worth the read given the importance of the topic.   As a sponsored post, this interview was published on a complimentary basis for everyone.