Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary

For the week ending September 15, 2023

Disney dominated what was otherwise a relatively slow week for news in the advertising industry, with reporting around Disney+ subscribers and interest in the ABC Network from Nexstar and Allen Media, according to Bloomberg.   My take on relevant considerations for Disney and the broader media industry can be found here. 

I also wrote about new economic data released this week, as retail sales data for August came out on Thursday.   The data wasn’t bad – up 2.9% year-over-year – but as I illustrated in my post, I can calculate that if we weight the different categories of retail for their propensity to spend on advertising, ad spend by these companies was probably up by more like 5% (primarily because e-commerce-based retailers spend disproportionately more on advertising than bricks-and-mortar based retailers).

So if this past week didn’t have much going on, what’s up for next week? Presumably more: at minimum there will be the IPO of Instacart, whose advertising business I wrote about a few weeks ago (commerce media remains the fastest growing scaled sector in advertising, and Instacart is one of its key players) and Pinterest will host an investor day. Although I’m doubtful the niche digital platforms such as Pinterest will be able to sustainably grow their advertising businesses by double digit levels from here, they remain important players in the eco-system - one of the world’s 20 largest sellers of advertising outside of China - and a useful source of diversification for large brands, who look to reduce their dependency on the largest platforms when they can.