"The Dumbest Trade War In History" Implications on Advertising, Canada Ad Trends, Google, Amazon, Pinterest Analyzed, Marketer CEO/CFO Commentary PLUS Ads 101 Series on B2B Vs. B2C Marketing
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for February 8, 2025
Each week on the M&W Podcast, we discuss Madison & Wall’s latest research. Last week we introduced 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.
The series continues with part 5 on Episode 21 with Ari Osur, a former CMO and senior marketer at multiple B2B companies, with whom we discuss the differences between B2C and B2B marketing. It follows on part 1 with Gerry D'Angelo where we discussed how marketers organize themselves, part 2 with Francisco Escobar on the role of marketing procurement , part 3 with Deborah Wahl on the choices marketers make in allocating their resources and part 4 with Gordon Ho on the differences between large, medium and small marketers. 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. New episodes are available Mondays. In our most recent episode posted last Monday, Olivia and I are joined by Chrissie Hanson of Omnicom’s OMD, with whom we talk about the evolving role of media agencies.
For more current alerts on this podcast and to see our well-informed hot-takes on agency news of the week, sign up to our free Agency Business companion Substack publication here.
Weekly work
We wrote about the consequences for advertising that would have (and still might) followed from “The Dumbest Trade War In History,” which remains a threat. Relatedly, following Canada’s BCE reporting its latest results, we published an overview of trends in advertising in Canada during the fourth quarter of 2024
With agency earnings underway we analyzed Publicis’ latest results, which highlighted a continuation of recent favorable (and likely industry-leading) trends
Among media owners, we wrote about Google and Snap, Amazon, Criteo and Pinterest, Disney, Fox and Spotify as well as the New York Times and News Corp’s results, showing low double-digit growth for digital advertising, modest growth for this set of TV-based media companies and flat results for publishers
We reviewed commentary from CEOs, CFOs and other senior marketers along with advertising spending data included in securities filings from Alphabet, Amazon, Clorox, Diageo, Ford, Hershey, L'Oreal, Mondelez, Pepsico and others, which generally showed growth in spending during the fourth quarter and full year (where data was available) and highlighted some of the areas that marketers are focusing on, such as digital analytics
We published research commissioned by Google focused on the future of planning and the management of customer journeys in a world where AI-driven platforms account for the bulk of marketer spending
More Context
In our full-length report (available to everyone on a complimentary basis here) entitled “The Future Of Planning Is The Platform,” we explored how marketers and agencies will adapt to a world where AI-driven platforms which generate their own creative assets and use a mix of video, audio and text represent the bulk of marketer spending.
We think that conventional approaches to media planning will have limited utility in this future, but many adjacent functions such as marketing strategy, account planning and the use of tools such as MMMs to optimize spending across platforms will all become increasingly important. Many media owners - especially those focused on traditional media historically - will find significant benefits from working closely with others to add to their scale. Marketers will also be far better positioned to manage spending against a much wider range of potential customer journeys rather than spending solely against the awareness, interest, decision, action-based framework that has been so widely used to inform budget choices for many decades.