Meta "Censors" 3P Fact-Checking, Hulu-Fubo Implications, Indie Agency Trends PLUS new Advertising 101 Series
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for January 11, 2025
Each week on the M&W Podcast, we discuss Madison & Wall’s latest research. Starting with this week’s episode, we are introducing our Advertising 101 series, a multi-part (i.e. every week all year-long) tutorial that will explain how the industry really works and why money flows as it does. We’re kicking things off with Gerry D’Angelo, currently a senior advisor at McKinsey and formerly the global VP of media at Procter & Gamble. In this episode we explore how and why marketers organize themselves the way they do. As much as anything we have done to date, we guarantee it will be worth your while.
It’s now available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We have also recently launched the Agency Business podcast focused on the business of agencies in collaboration with Olivia Morley’s FusionFront Media. In our newest episode, Olivia Morley and I are joined for a fascinating conversation with independent agency FerebeeLane's co-founders Matt Ferebee and Josh Lane to talk about working with high-end brands, broadening service offerings, global expansion and how Matt and Josh manage their business more generally. Click here to listen now.
Weekly work
The big news of the week involved Meta announcing it would end third-party fact-checking and, effectively, allow more bad content on its platforms. As we wrote, we don’t think it will cause marketers to change their budgeting. Instead, marketers will likely need to get used to less brand safety and suitability in their campaigns.
We published new estimates for growth among independent agencies, which we think grew by around 2% in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Disney and Fubo announced that the Hulu Live vMPVD and Fubo’s business would merge, leaving Fubo management to run the business and withdraw its lawsuit to block the launch of Venu, which its owners subsequently decided to shut down. We explored the implications of the news on advertising here.
TikTok faced the US Supreme Court on Friday. We wrote about our current baseline expectations, which includes an eventual shut down of the app in the US and a shift of spend primarily to Google, Meta and Snap here.
More Context
Every quarter we track growth rates for hundreds of independent advertising agencies. Looking deeper, we think the 30 biggest among them (a group covering around $10 billion of annual revenue) grew by approximately 2% in the fourth quarter of 2024.
A handful grew by double-digit levels and a handful declined by mid-single digits. To the extent they can serve as a proxy for the largest holding companies, they suggest that we’ll see another quarter of relatively tepid growth for the broader sector when the biggest holding companies report results for the quarter in the coming weeks.
Full details and underlying data are available to Madison and Wall’s corporate subscribers and advisory clients.