Madison and Wall: From The Archives, May 2023 Edition

A review of past reports on drivers of global media inflation (2020), the US TV upfront marketplace (2012) and how different segments of marketers budget differently (2012)

I've written thousands of reports and articles for publication in my various roles over the years at Interpublic's Magna Global, Simulmedia, Pivotal Research and GroupM.  Consequently, I am regularly reviewing some of my own historical documents to potentially find new insights and also to remind myself about how the industry evolved as it did. These articles or links are housed at www.madisonandwall.com

With the US television upfront marketplace approaching, I thought it would be useful to refer back to some older articles I wrote on media inflation. 

In one piece from 2020 while at GroupM I wrote about the general factors beyond changes in supply and demand which can drive media inflation in any medium in any country (such as industry concentration, relative degrees of indifference between buyers and sellers, information asymmetries and many other drivers).

In another report from 2012 while an analyst at Pivotal Research, I wrote a deep dive about many of the mechanics of the US national TV upfront marketplace and how it works.  Most of the observations still hold true today.

Lastly for this month’s archive review, I have frequently tried to focus on the ways different segments of marketers behave as those behaviors are far more important – and often disconnected from – consumer behaviors because corporate processes determine budget allocations.   I wrote about this topic at length in an initiation of coverage on internet advertising in early 2012, where I launched on Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

In this extensive extract I explored many of the ways in which large brands behave differently than small ones, and how those who are primarily oriented around performance or direct response-like metrics similarly exhibit different behaviors, and thus budget very differently.   The critical point is that one should not think about marketer spending preferences in a monolithic manner.