Google's Search Durability, Canada Ad Forecast, More 1Q25 Advertising Results + Ads101 on Programmatic With Dentsu's Zac Selby
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for May 10, 2025
Will you be in Cannes for the Lions? Are you returning via Paris? If so, on Sunday June 22 (the Sunday following the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity) we will be organizing another “chocolate marathon,” a nearly 26-mile path around Paris, France over the course of the day. To see a past route and get a sense of what it looks like, visit www.chocolatemarathon.com. If you would like to join in for some or all of the day please reach out and let us know.
On this week’s M&W Podcast we summarize our take on economy, advertising industry earnings results and more. Plus, our Advertising 101 series continues with a focus on digital advertising – and programmatic advertising in particular – with Dentsu Media’s global addressable lead, Zac Selby.
This follows the past several months of this series where we explored the role of agencies. Our first six parts focused on marketers and how they allocate resources.
Separately, on Agency Business, Olivia Morley and I interviewed Jared Belsky, CEO of Acadia for a very engaging dialog about mid-sized agencies, the pros and cons of principal-based trading and much more.
Weekly Work:
Google Search Trial: Implications From Apple/AI Search Competition Commentary
Canada Advertising Forecast: 3.4% Growth For 2025, 2.9% For 2026
Movie Production Tariffs: Harbinger For Threats Of Advertising Services Tariffs, Too
Disney, NYT Calendar Year 1Q25 Advertising Trends and Outlook Not-So-Bad
WBD, Nexstar, Gray, BCE, Quebecor and Lamar 1Q25 Ad Trends: Weak, But Not Unexpectedly-So
Paramount, The Trade Desk, Outfront, Ziff Davis, Pinterest and More
More Context:
On Wednesday during testimony associated with the US court case from last year which ruled Google a monopolist in search (now in the remedies phase), Bloomberg reported Apple’s Eddie Cue testifying that a) “searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month” and b) “he believes Apple will bring (AI search providers such as OpenAI, PerplexityAI and Anthropic) options to Safari in the future.”
The news evidently spooked investors, at least, as Alphabet stock fell significantly in an otherwise stable stock market. However, the question for industry participants to consider should be: will declines in search queries (even if broadly applied) and the advent of AI search tools cause changes to ad budgets?
In the short term, the answer is (to us, at least) clearly no.
To explain, we have always noted that if search is to become more efficient, there should be fewer queries rather than more. In addition, changes in supply don’t impact changes in demand when it comes to most forms of advertising, at least across media (within media is a different story).
With respect to the rise of AI-based tools replacing search, this issue is not unlike the threats that Google faced (and still faces) with Microsoft’s Bing and other smaller search engines. We believe the vast majority of buyers of search only buy search from Google, primarily because their budgets are so small (the typical advertiser likely spends under $10,000 per year). Even if Google’s share fell to, say, 50% of search queries / activity and the rest of the industry was fragmented among many others who each had, say, 10% or less share, Google would probably retain 80-90% of all spending on search simply because managing multiple search products involves too much time and effort for most small businesses.
Of course, in the long-term, behaviors from advertisers can change, and it could become easier to buy across multiple search and AI platforms for small businesses. But it will likely take an extended period of time before one should assume there will be any meaningful changes to market shares for the search business.