Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary
For the week ending May 19, 2023
Below is a summary of some of key data points and ideas from my regular publications during the past week:
US Services Spending Up 9.7% During 1Q23, Reflecting Ongoing Growth For Important Advertising Categories. Services-related categories of marketers are significantly more important to the economy and the advertising industry, but get relatively little attention when compared with retail sales. In this note I review new data for the US which shows significant ongoing growth during the most recent quarter.
New Netflix Data: Implications For Subscriber and Ad-Free TV Consumption Trends. Netflix provided data on the number of subscribers to its advertising tier, which in turn provided some insights about the tier’s subscriber base and churn. In this note I also gathered some new data from Antenna, which indicated that 16% of US gross additions subscribed to the ad-supported tier, including 17% during April. However, this data also showed that the new ad-supported subscribers aren’t offsetting the growth of ad-free consumption of Netflix, as new Nielsen data indicating as much also came out this week.
Emerging Ad Channels Driving Incremental Growth. One of the less appreciated factors inhibiting growth of some historically dominant traditional media is a number of newly scaled emerging platforms. Walmart, for example, grew “nearly” 40% during the most recent quarter and is almost certainly one of the top 20 sellers of advertising globally outside of China this year. As another illustration of retail media’s expansion, subsequent to publishing this piece, The Information revealed that Instacart grew 30% in during 2022. In connected TV the likes of Vizio, Samsung and LG are clearly growing and probably taking share, too.
Out-of-Home Advertising: Top 4 Grew 4.7% Organically in 1Q23, Ongoing Growth to Come. I calculated the most recent quarter’s growth of outdoor advertising and described some of the drivers of that growth when some other forms of “traditional” media are exhibiting decline.