Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

For the week ending November 17, 2023:

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E-commerce featured prominently in the pieces I published this past week, first looking at Amazon’s announcements with Snap, Meta, Pinterest and others and secondly reviewing the latest US Census Bureau’s e-commerce data for the third quarter. E-commerce is, along with performance-based media in general, having a significant impact on the advertising world including on agencies and ad tech, in both positive and negative ways.

Wrapping up the quarter’s financial results for agencies, Dentsu posted unexpectedly soft results and amplified an apparent trend around some agencies significantly underperforming others, which I assess in this note. I also completed a compilation of the quarter’s results for the larger publicly listed ad tech companies, which shows solid growth, by contrast, well ahead of other parts of the advertising business. There are diverging trends for companies in that sector, too. Ad tech companies focused on display advertising and CTV are not necessarily doing as well as they might have hoped, while those whose products are skewed towards social video and, of course, retail media, appear to be faring relatively better.