‘Elbows Up!’: Global Ad Sellers’ International Revenue Shares Analyzed, Auto Advertising Impact From US Policies, MNTN’s S1 + the Opportunity (or Lack Thereof) for SMBs in CTV And More
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for March 8, 2025
Each week on the M&W Podcast, we discuss Madison & Wall’s latest research and continue with our Advertising 101 series, an ongoing tutorial that will explain how the industry really works and why money flows as it does.
After our initial multi-week phase focused on marketers and the ways in which they make decisions, we’re now onto agencies. We started with Macquarie Securities’ Tim Nollen to provide an overview of the agency holding companies, the continued with Heartmore’s Carl Hartman to discuss the role of the global client leader. This week we’ll go into more depth on media agencies specifically with Prof. Janna Greenberg to talk about how these entities are organized – critical, in context of how money flows on to sellers of advertising.
It’s all available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also hear more about our work on agencies through the Agency Business podcast, a collaboration with FusionFront Media’s Olivia Morley’s. This past week’s podcast included a must-listen to interview of industry legend, Bob Lord. After time in senior roles at Razorfish, AOL and IBM, he’s now President of Horizon Media, the world’s largest independent media agency. Don’t miss it!
Before we get to the work of the week, we have a special offer related to the AdTech Economic Forum which takes place in New York on March 19. We’ll be participating on stage! If you don’t already have a ticket, Madison and Wall subscribers can get a 30% discount to the event. Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/adtecheconomicforum/1308155
Use code: friends_of_BrianWieser
Weekly work
We reviewed MNTN’s S1 and the opportunity (or lack thereof) from SMBs on CTV
We analyzed revenue and profitability trends for the largest independent ad tech companies during 4Q24. Sure, it was a little slower vs. the prior quarter’s growth, but then again growth has been arguably too elevated
We also analyzed growth trends during 4Q24 for the top 20 global sellers of advertising. Their steady low ‘teens growth illustrates conditions were still very positive for advertising in the quarter. Although not necessarily for incumbent single country-focused broadcasters, as we saw with new results from ITV and ProSiebenSat1. But ‘Elbows Up!’ Not enough people are considering the long-term consequences of ‘America First’ policies on the global opportunity for US companies to operate abroad. As part of this work, we analyzed the share of revenue each of the largest media owners generates from outside of the United States
At least agencies should be reasonably well positioned outside of the US, as operations are generally quite localized, are often owned by entities based outside of the US, can be very fluid and generally operate below the radar. We wrote about them this week in context of Havas’ unsurprising 4Q24 results and 2025 guidance and Publicis’ relatively surprising acquisition of data management platform Lotame.
At the same time, agencies are heavily exposed to the auto industry – much more than the rest of the advertising business is now. We quantified these shares and outlined risks to spending in the auto category that may follow from the potential (or threatened) implementation of tariffs on the category within the United States
More Context
MNTN’s S1 was on its own unremarkable, with the most obviously interesting angle related to actor / investor and (at least technically, as someone who lived a block away and went to the same high school two years ahead of) former neighbor Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort agency separating itself from the company.
But the bigger story put forward by MNTN is one that most of the biggest traditional media companies (Comcast’s NBCU, Disney, Paramount and others) are trying to tell as well: that there’s a lot of opportunity that could follow from bringing small and medium-sized advertisers to connected TV.
In our note, we tore apart some of the data used in the filing and provided what we think is superior data vs. what was included in the S1 (ours is based on various government sources) to illustrate how the opportunity is probably much smaller than MNTN and many others think it is.
That doesn’t mean there’s not a real business in there, or that there’s not incremental growth for others chasing this space, but we do think that appropriate level-setting is important, if only to help prioritize new investment opportunities.