Non-Sports Content Spend -14% Through 2029. As CPGs Flatten What Happens To Their Ad Spend? Plus, Accenture Song Benchmarked and More
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for December 21, 2024
Each week on the M&W Podcast, we discuss Madison & Wall’s latest research and walk listeners through how the advertising business works. Episode 15 of the Madison & Wall M&W Podcast is 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 and I interview Forrester’s Jay Pattisal to discuss the Omnicom-Interpublic transaction and implications across the industry. Click here to listen now.
Weekly work
For our paid subscribers, we published a report detailing total sports content spending in the past and commitments made into the future. We then juxtaposed those figures against our expectations for total programming budgets. We think spending on non-sports content by US broadcasters, streamers and networks will decline by around -14% over the next five years.
We also published a review of the flattening organic growth trends for CPG companies. To the extent that CPG marketers were responsible for an outsized share of growth in spending last year – and we think they were, especially on retail media – it’s hard to fathom that trend continuing in a world with tepid growth for these companies.
We also benchmarked Accenture Song’s ongoing outperformance vs. agency holding companies.
For all free subscribers, we published an interview with Mediaocean’s Bill Wise to talk about that company’s new initiatives, such as the investment they’ve taken from IPG, Omnicom and WPP as well as their pending acquisition of Innovid in context of the company’s broader strategy.
More Context
In our publication on sports rights, we calculated the annual costs for the rights to air games from dozens of leagues over multiple decades in the past and as far into the future as possible. Doing so allows us to calculate the average annual budget commitment that US TV networks and streamers have individually and collectively made to the leagues.
We put this all in context of the revenue that we further calculate networks, stations and streamers (collectively a group we call “packagers”) generate. Their sources of revenue at this level of the business are primarily distribution fees, streaming subscription revenues and advertising sales.
We then made estimates around overall programming budgets as a percentage of revenue and having made the estimates on spending on sports, derive spending on non-sports content. In our note we calculated a -14% decline in spending in non-sports programming in the United States over the next five years.
We further explored a range of considerations that should follow for these companies, marketers, studios, news producers and entertainment industry professionals (and anyone else who cares about professionally-produced content).