Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

For the week ending July 7, 2023

This past week saw the launch of Meta’s Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter’s flagship product.    I was reminded of some of the ideas I put forward about Twitter and its long-term potential back in 2013 around the time of Twitter’s IPO, which you can read in full here at my archive on madisonandwall.com.

Most important is the idea that Meta has a new opportunity to develop advertising products that reflect the unique differences between text-focused content rather than video-focused content.  As I noted a decade ago, what Facebook was to TV, Twitter was to radio – a lower-fidelity, but potentially more mentally immersive platform (“hot” media as Marshall Mcluhan might have characterized it).  That could have implications for the way advertisers use it, if the Threads’ ad products ultimately reflect this notion.

Beyond commentary on Threads and Twitter, during the last I also published new analyses on the growth of independent advertising agencies and a separate one on ad tech during the second quarter of 2023.   Overall, the data points I look at continue to convey to me that the industry continues to grow, albeit at a modest rate right now, but this is as much due to difficult comparables as anything else, which I also highlighted the week before last.