Sir Martin In Davos; Amazon's Ad Business In Context

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Swiss Cheddar

Of the $50 billion or so WPP spent on media in the past year, about $5 billion went to Google and $2 billion to Facebook, according to CEO Martin Sorrell, speaking to Fox Business Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Though the digital juggernauts are the biggest growth channels, the combined media investment in Disney and 21st Century Fox’s film and TV studio, which Disney acquired in December, would make up $3 billion on WPP media plans. Amazon Advertising Platform is expected to grow from $200 million last year to $300 million this year – a strong growth rate, though far behind the incumbents. Sorrell also bemoaned the challenges faced by ad agencies globally. “We’re increasingly viewed as a cost. And we’re not, we’re an investment.” Watch the segment.

Tricks Of The Trade

Morgan Stanley is calling bluff on Amazon’s ability to take on the digital ad duopoly, reports Mike Shields for Business Insider. Despite being on trajectory to rake in nearly $8 billion in ad revenue by 2019, most of Amazon’s ad revenue will come from trade promotions, like coupons and in-store branding, rather than the digital ad budgets possessed by Facebook and Google. Trade marketing is a $178 billion category in the US, and Amazon is poised to push trade budgets to data-driven product display and search ads. By wading deeper into trade marketing, the financial services firm predicts Amazon could increase the digital ad spend pie by 50%. More.

Tale Of Two OSs

The Google Play store exceeded 19 billion new global app downloads – its most ever in a quarter – and is pulling further away from Apple’s Apple Store, which had about 8 billion downloads, per App Annie’s Q4 2017 app economy report (read the release). Meanwhile, Apple accounted for almost twice the mobile consumer spending for the same period: $11.5 billion to Google’s $6 billion. The reason: Google’s download surge is powered by emerging markets, where discretionary spending is far more limited than in Apple’s first-world stronghold.

Spur Of The Moment

Twitter launched an ad product Friday, Sponsored Moments, which allows brands to promote themselves in the platform’s section of tweets curated around events. The feature will let brands include a branded image and around a specific moment and insert its own tweets about the event onto the Moments page. Bloomberg, for example, is running a Sponsored Moment around the World Economic Forum in Davos with Bank of America. Sponsored Moments can be targeted to different audiences using Twitter’s ad products. TechCrunch has more.

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