Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

For the week ending October 28, 2023: Results From Meta, Amazon, Comcast, WPP and news about Disney, Viaplay and more

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A big earnings week showed that advertising is alive and well – it’s just that the beneficiaries are digital platforms, whose advantages are likely to grow as data associated with retail sales (i.e. at Amazon) or with AI-driven performance products (Alphabet and Meta) increasingly drives shares of spending by marketers. 

Agencies are doing ok in this environment, all things considered, although as WPP’s results conveyed, not all of them at the present time, in part because many of the aforementioned tech companies and their peers are generally reducing their spending on marketing and related services. 

Traditional television network owners are seeing declining trends, as illustrated by Comcast’s results, and as I’ve written in different contexts, the primary challenge is that the economy is producing companies who are predisposed towards spending money on digital platforms.  It won’t help if TV network owners pursuing global scale pull back, as we’re seeing from some - including Disney and Viaplay. That just makes it easier for those who stick with strategies to pursue global scale, such as Netflix and Amazon, to realize their ambitions and build bigger platforms - whose ultimate primary customers will be the consumers who will pay for these services.

Creative destruction isn’t about the end of a classic advertising agency brand name (although that’s happening, too) but more about the ongoing evolution of the economy and forces that cause changes which are far greater than any one company can overcome, at least without radical changes to counter those trends.