Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for May 4, 2024

Amazon, Pinterest, BCE + dozens of large marketers' 1Q24 results show a very healthy ad business. Despite that (or because of it?), agency employee churn remains high. Plus, data businesses explained.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Madison and Wall is hiring! For more information, please check out https://madisonandwall.com/join-us or email brian@madisonandwall.com.

Earnings season is mid-way through for 1Q24 results, and almost all signs continue to point to strong and / or accelerated ex-political advertising growth, suggesting that by the time all of the numbers are in, the quarter will post faster industry-wide growth than we saw in 4Q23 on an ex-political basis. 

In support of this trend, the most important media industry results of the week came from Amazon, the world’s #3 seller of advertising outside of China.  I analyzed their results along with those from Pinterest, Paramount, France’s TF1 and SiriusXM here but also calculated Amazon’s growing “take-rate”, estimating how its ad revenue has grown as a percentage of GMV (gross merchandising volume) from 2018-2023 here.   Subsequently released results from Ebay, Canada’s BCE and much of the outdoor advertising industry showed similar trends

Meanwhile, in a note about the agency industry, I looked at new multi-year data on employee churn (which is generally improving, but still higher than it probably should be) and provided a taxonomy and descriptions of different kinds of data businesses, including those focused on services, software, data assets and media inventory.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, from looking at earnings call transcripts from over the past couple of weeks from top 100 marketers including Adidas, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Unilever, Wayfair and seventeen other companies, I aggregated current qualitative and quantitative information related to CEO and CFO thoughts on marketing and advertising activity.   Across multiple industries, CEOs and CFOs have generally become boosters of advertising to a degree that may be somewhat surprising, but then again, with the growing use of data and demonstrations of “performance” they may be much more persuaded now about its utility than they were in the past.