Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
View From The Top
The world’s largest advertisers have … not changed much in the past year.
The top five advertisers – Amazon, L’Oréal, Alibaba, Procter & Gamble and Samsung – held their positions in the latest Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers ranking.
The only addition to the top 10 was Pinduoduo, parent company of Temu, which in the past year has been wildly spending on ads to grow a US footprint.
Spend rates have stabilized, somewhat, after the chaos of the early pandemic and the global recession last year.
Starting next year, year-over-year growth rates may once again be relevant.
But one side-by-side metric that jumps out is the large dropoff in spend by European and Asian companies. The top 100 advertisers grew their budgets by 2.3% on average. Those headquartered in the US grew 8.7%, while Asia-based marketers spent 11% less than last year.
However, Pinduoduo is listed as an Irish-based company since it moved its HQ to Dublin this year. But really, it’s a Chinese-backed business. And it alone might be enough to slightly rebalance those growth rates for the top 100.
The average growth rates are misleading, too. Of the top 100 advertisers, 48 increased their marketing spend, another 48 decreased marketing and four held steady.
Watch Me
Netflix is starting to inform movie and TV producers and stars how many people are watching programs like theirs, Bloomberg reports.
Providing comps for viewership data is one area where streaming companies have lagged behind linear TV, which has long made it possible for producers to do apples-to-apples comparisons.
Netflix has inched toward greater transparency in recent years. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has called it “completely transparent” with producers, citing how it posts its top 10 program lists – and the viewing hours for those programs – online.
Of course, a top 10 list reveals which programs are the most popular, but not how the vast majority of shows are doing.
The new insights Netflix is giving actors and producers would be confined to how they do compared to similar shows. Although it’s unclear even what “similar” shows are being compared. It is a measly replacement for the cold, hard cash tied to Nielsen ratings or weekly box office scores back in the long, long ago.
The Not Great Wall
GroupM is dealing with the fallout of a Chinese government investigation into corruption in its Shanghai office.
One employee at the WPP-owned agency was detained last Friday during a surprise raid. That employee was fired by WPP, and the company severed ties with an unnamed business party involved in the case, Bloomberg reports. Another two former GroupM employees were detained as well.
The case may be a one-off, or perhaps it’s nothing.
But China’s actions in this case are under the general global business spotlight because it’s part of a broader crackdown by the Chinese government of its own citizens who work for large non-Chinese companies. The Shanghai offices of Bain & Co., for instance, were raided earlier this year, and a few Chinese employees at the firm were barred from leaving mainland China, reports The Wall Street Journal.
If the situation spirals and the schism intensifies between Chinese and international tech and media economies, one loser would be The Trade Desk, which is pretty much the only ad tech company to have planted a flag and committed heavily to its business in China.
But Wait, There’s More!
Marketers sound off on year one of Netflix’s plan for ad dollars. [Digiday]
Ebiquity worked with 31 large Twitter advertisers a year; all but two have pulled their spend. [Insider]
Marketing firm Mod Op buys Crenshaw Communications. [Axios]
Why a newly merged VML could be greater than the sum of its parts. [The Drum]
