Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

For the week ending Jan. 6, 2024

This past week I initiated the paid version of Madison & Wall for advisory and consulting clients as well as stand-alone subscribers.   

If you work for a company that has access but I don’t have your corporate address, please reach out to me at brian@madisonandwall.com and I can make sure you are added to the full distribution list.

If you and your company don’t yet have access but would like to please enquire about it!

This past week’s research included the following:

• “Indie Agencies Halted Deceleration in 4Q23” and “Ad Tech 4Q23 Headcount Growth Increases Confidence of 4Q Ad Acceleration Forecast” are self-explanatory as summaries.  Taken together, the two provide positive data points on the state of the overall ad market. 

• “Streaming Ad Inventory Grows, But Total TV Ad Volumes Still Decline” takes new data provided to me by Antenna along with other data from Nielsen to make some current (i.e. November 2023) estimates for how much TV ad inventory is out there.

• “Lessons in Economics” (unlikely to ever be the title of a series from Apple TV+) looked at the concepts of comparative advantage and natural monopolies in context of trends for digital advertising vs. TV and the state of measurement given news this past week about VideoAmp downsizing and, subsequent to publication, news that Kantar may be selling its global TV measurement business.

You can see Mediapost’s take on my analysis of TV ad inventory here and listen to an extended interview I did with AdExchanger’s  Allison Schiff on current trends in the advertising economy for its AdExchanger Talks podcast here.