Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

Aug 19, 2023

I caught up on the tail end of earnings season with a few key notes, including a summary of results for the 20 largest sellers of advertising (unsurprisingly, for those following my writing closely, the numbers were up solidly, with better results likely to follow in the coming quarters), detailed commentary from a dozen of the largest marketers as well as e-commerce and retail media trends, highlighted in this week’s quarterly results from Walmart (whose ad revenues grew by 35% during the most recent quarter. I didn’t get a chance to write about the latest US Census data related to spending on services – which I think gets a lot less attention than it deserves, at least relative to retail spending data – but it’s always worth looking at. Year-over-year, spending on services in the US was up by 8.9% in the second quarter.

Finally, I published an extensive interview with industry legend Richy Glassberg, CEO of Safeguard Privacy to explore the issue of privacy and his new venture which is focused on the topic. As privacy is only going to grow in importance to the tech and media industries (not to mention marketing) with every passing year, this is far from the boring topic some have suggested it is.