Newsroom

Væksten kommer til at ligge på e-commerce. Derfor er det i fokus i GroupM's centrale forretningsenhed, hvor man samler specialistviden inden for de globale platforme. Ny ansvarlig er Jeppe Lehrmann, der bliver en del af den overordnede ledelse i GroupM.

The Oprah Winfrey interview of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, and everything that followed was arguably one of the biggest stories of the week. While its revelations were significant at a societal level, the event itself was also illustrative of the capacity of important content to generate audiences. In the same vein, there was news this week related to traditional TV network owners and emerging streaming services highlight that European media owners will need to invest in content more aggressively if they are to keep up with the much larger and more globally-oriented American conglomerates in pursuit of the same audiences. New data from the OECD conveyed improved expectations for economic growth this year versus that of only a few months ago. As the pandemic hopefully abates over the course of the year, the overall economy in many countries should be substantially healthier for consumers and marketers too.

The week’s biggest news for the media industry centered around Google as they provided an update that will more clearly align their ad tech with a more privacy-first web. While the news will rightly concentrate minds around the need to reassess how they manage and activate digital media budgets, marketers may also want to use the opportunity to revisit how they allocate resources toward brand building versus performance advertising. The week also brought us an opportunity to review how some of the world’s largest brand owners fared in the fourth quarter and through all of 2020. On our calculations, organic growth for the packaged goods industry was remarkably normal but, unsurprisingly, featured rapid growth in e-commerce. As television will remain an essential medium for those marketers for many years to come, connected TV will play an increasingly important role. News of the week from Roku, Nielsen, and Vizio further illustrated trends in that sector too.

This past week’s most prominent global issue in the media industry—and certainly its own big general news story—was Facebook’s restriction on sharing news content in Australia. The issue resonates globally because it represents an active front for governments around the world who are looking to affect the operations of companies, including Facebook, Alphabet and Amazon. As we argue in our weekly Global Marketing Monitor, the episode illustrates that the financial discipline these companies have applied to their operations has, to some degree, limited the damage they have done to publishers. It has also opened up opportunities for these publishers to fight their way back to growth.

Many large-scale technology-centered web-endemic companies cut their advertising in 2020 after growing rapidly in prior years; 2021 trends are difficult to anticipate. A more important long-term factor will be the degree to which creative destruction produces new brands that depend heavily on advertising. Several recent IPOs illustrate there are many more emerging companies who are large, becoming larger and spend heavily on advertising. A good example of creative destruction can be found in the emergence of streaming video services, as with Disney+ and Hulu, for which new data was released this past week.