Ceci N’est Pas Un Récession
It seems like the last quarter treated agency holdcos pretty well – the French ones, anyway.
Take Publicis Groupe, which exceeded analyst forecasts yet again with an organic YoY growth rate of 5.7% for the quarter. As reported on Tuesday, the agency also raised its annual guidance a second time, to between 5% and 5.5% for the year.
On the call with investors, CEO Arthur Sadoun shared that all those long-feared, tariff-induced cuts in client spending still haven’t materialized – and that instead, there’s been an “acceleration in client demand” for the AI products and services.
Similarly, Havas posted strong organic growth of 3.8% for Q3 overall, and updated its own guidance for 2025 to between 2.5% and 3%. (Previously, it was above 2%). A lot of that success came from remarkably solid performance in North America, according to the agency’s press release.
So, agencies are saying the “economic uncertainty” shoe still hasn’t dropped… and maybe it won’t. And yet, Publicis’s revenue growth rate is in line with the IAB’s revised projection of 5.7% ad spend growth for 2025 – which the IAB downgraded last month due to tariff pressure.
Maybe advertisers are taking a “smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em” approach to their budgets right now. Who can tell anymore?
Video Saved The Podcast Star
The video podcast wars are heating up. Spotify is bringing some high-profile video podcasts to Netflix, Business Insider reports.
The multi-year licensing agreement initially centers on 16 podcasts, most of which are produced by Spotify-owned The Ringer, including “The Bill Simmons Podcast” and “The Rewatchables,” as well as some Spotify Studios-produced shows. These podcasts will stream concurrently on Spotify and Netflix starting in early 2026 – and notably, they will no longer stream on YouTube.
Also notable: The Spotify podcasts will still feature their baked-in host-read ad spots when they air on Netflix – regardless of whether the user is in Netflix’s fully paid or ad-supported subscription tier. It’s unclear whether Netflix will add its own ad placements. It’s also unclear how revenue-sharing will work between the two platforms.
It’s the latest example of Spotify and Netflix trying to win video podcast market share from YouTube.
It’s also a temperature check on the wider podcast monetization market. While programmatic digital audio ad spend has been growing by double digits for years, the narrative persists that digital audio ad spend does not match user time spent engaging with podcasts. Plus, video ads net higher CPMs overall. Hence why audio-first Spotify is homing in on the video market.
Tracker? I Hardly Know Her!
NaturalCycle is a mobile app for birth control and fertility tracking, a market that’s benefited by the expansion of wearable devices that monitor temperatures and other signals that allow users to track their cycles.
User beware, perhaps, but it’s approved by the FDA as a Class II medical device.
And NaturalCycle is looking to raise another financing round, following a $55 million investment last year, Bloomberg reports.
The company is profitable, says co-founder and CEO Berglund Scherwitzl.
And long may it last. Because it’s another example of an app built on sensitive health data. A report from June highlighted how data from period-tracking apps often makes its way to the ad ecosystem.
But there are countless examples of ads businesses built from sensitive data pools. Also in June, the family safety app Life360 launched a location data business for ad purposes. And there’s currently an auction playing out for 23andMe’s data assets. 23andMe long since declared bankruptcy but nobody knows what to do with it because there’s this large, highly sensitive library of data to hand off to … someone?
For users, part of the risk is that while an app might start with one business model, shifting sands could expose data a few business turnarounds later.
But Wait! There’s More!
Instagram will start using the PG-13 movie rating to determine what content all user accounts under age 18 can see. [blog]
DirecTV will soon bring personalized, AI-generated ads to TV screensavers. [The Verge]
US Attorney General Pam Bondi confirms that the Department of Justice pressured Facebook to remove a group page she says “was being used to dox and target [ICE] agents in Chicago.” [post]
Walmart and OpenAI team up to allow users to buy products directly on ChatGPT. [Bloomberg]
Separately, OpenAI wants to reduce political bias in AI by preventing ChatGPT from validating users’ political beliefs. [Ars Technica]
Is generative AI’s productivity boost a myth? [Tech Policy Press]
Six legitimate recession indicators that companies (and advertisers!) should actually look out for. [Washington Post]
You’re Hired!
Reddit hires WPP alum Sharb Farjami as VP of global agency and partnerships. [post]
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