RTL, TF1 and Corus vs. Amazon, Disney and Netflix, Politics in Agency-Land and Pharma Ads + More
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for June 28, 2025
On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week. Separately, on Agency Business, Olivia Morely interviews Tim Ringel of the agency Meet The People, and I join her for a discussion of the industry’s latest news.
Also this past week we appeared on The Economist’s latest “Money Talks” podcast on an episode entitled “Will AI Eat The Advertising Industry,” which can be accessed here.
Weekly Work:
More Context:
Cutting across a couple of weeks of news and multiple countries, the latest updates from TF1, RTL and Corus show several different potential approaches for incumbent large TV broadcasters around the world looking to manage in a world where they increasingly compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ (and increasingly Google’s YouTube, too).
As we wrote in these notes, the news from TF1 is a model we’ll see more often, where an traditional network owner partners in a significant way with one of the global giants to grow audience shares and eventually license more content (and probably provide the global streamer with political “air cover,” too). RTL’s plan to buy Sky Deutschland doesn’t help them compete by building out content scale across multiple markets, but it does represent an investment, at least, and probably makes RTL more powerful within Germany than it was before. It’s not ideal, it’s certainly better than approaches involving ongoing cost cuts or disinvestments, which will almost surely lead to ongoing declines that are unlikely to reverse any time soon.