Strategic Intelligence: Advertising Sector Scorecard Q3 2024 Update

On both sides of the Atlantic, Apple, Alphabet, and Meta face concerted regulatory efforts to end their dominant position in the digital advertising market. The European Commission has started to enforce the Digital Markets Act (DMA) this year, focusing on Apple and Alphabet’s dominance in app stores and Meta’s use of personal data for advertising. The latest lawsuit from the US Department of Justice (DoJ) takes aim at Alphabet’s lucrative adtech business, with potential remedies including breaking up the company. Regulation is a key theme in the thematic screen of the analyst’s advertising sector scorecard, with a weighting of 15%. All Big Tech companies have negative scores for this theme.

Key Highlights

• Online advertising plays a significant role in the US presidential elections, with more than $619 million spent on the two largest digital ad platforms - Meta and Google - in the 2024 election cycle through the end of August. Although social media giants have become critical battlegrounds for political campaigns, they operate without the transparency mandated for traditional broadcast media.
• Advertising has been caught up in the artificial intelligence (AI) frenzy and will be one of the industries most disrupted by AI. Generative AI is reshaping advertisers’ practices through tailored and effective ads and dynamic campaigns that evolve according to consumer response. As a result, the relationship between technology, artists, and the brands paying for campaigns will profoundly change over the coming years. There is a real concern that advertisers will divert their money into AI-generated art rather than paying artists and creatives.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the advertising sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst’s thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• At the analyst, we have developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets-patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news-to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.