Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary
Analysis of news and data from Disney, YouTube, L'Oreal, Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis and more for the week ending Feb. 10, 2024
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In the thick of earnings season came an announcement from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox around a sport-centric streaming service that was potentially more significant than any quarterly results might be. If successful, it could have a dramatic impact on the video industry (and advertising) – probably more negative than many expect in the near-term, but positive in the long-run for reasons I explained in my note. On the other hand, as I also described it, there is a risk that the effort could become known as ClownCo 2.0.
You can hear some perspective on this initiative from me on Bloomberg Surveillance here starting at the 10:33 mark.
Quarterly results that were provided by Disney the next day saw more focus on the sports venture, Taylor Swift and an Epic Games investment, but they overshadowed the relatively weak advertising trends I calculated. Directionally these were similar to what we saw at Fox, Snap and the New York Times Co. among many others, although as I pointed out, where there is weakness in the current environment it is often because spending is shifting to other suppliers of ad inventory, including Google (especially YouTube, whose content spending I estimate is now only exceeded by Disney’s), Meta, Amazon and TikTok.
For actual data from the perspective of marketers, we can see generlaly positive trends in results from many of the world’s largest, as illustrated in results from L’Oreal and Unilever among others. The relationship between Amazon and L’Oreal (and luxury businesses) is something else I covered in that context, too.
Finally, more results came out from agency holding companies including Omnicom and Interpublic who provided us with a first look at quarterly results along with Publicis, who provided fuller details around their quarter and year. With these results I was able to quantify the overall growth rate for the biggest agency holding companies. I also explained why some are growing faster than others and why some are growing slower (hint: it’s not only because of exposure to technology advertisers cutting budgets).