Top 20 Global Media Companies' Growth, Globant, Dentsu, and US Video Services Spending for 2Q24

With second quarter earnings season mostly coming to a close for the bulk of the advertising industry it was a relatively quiet week.  We did get new data from Walmart showing that it grew its global ad business by 26%, and with that we were able to quantify that the world’s top 20 sellers of advertising outside of China grew their global ad revenues by 13.7%.   This was pretty close to the first quarter’s 15.5% growth rate, and when we consider the harder comparable from 2Q23 relative to the 1Q23 comparable, 2Q24 looks just about as strong as 1Q24 was.

We also wrote about second quarter’s pay TV and video spending trends in the United States during the most recent quarter, which once again posted low single digit growth (growing by 1.2% year-over-year).   Consistent with our analysis of the topic in other recent quarters, cord-cutting – including of virtual MVPDs – continues at high levels with another period of -7% decline in subscriptions.   Also as before, consumers appear to be shifting spending away from pay TV and towards streaming services, serving as a reminder that the more streamers try to raise prices, the more consumers are likely to react by eliminating their other video services given their relative value advantage.

With Dentsu reporting its second quarter results we then dug into what we learned about country-specific trends across the agency industry for the UK, Germany, France, China, Australia and Canada.  France generally looked quite positive and China somewhat negative, while most markets were more generally mixed.  We then also dug into the growth of digital transformation services with Globant reporting its results as well.   Beyond media agencies which are driving growth today, marketing-focused IT services are one of the most significant sources of future growth, likely in every country around the world.