Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

Insights from Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2021 report

“The final tally for advertising’s global pandemic pullback is in: Spending for the world’s 100 biggest advertisers skidded with the second-sharpest drop in the 35 years that Ad Age has produced its global report,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports in an introduction to the just-released Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2021 ranking.

“But the most intriguing takeaway” from the report, Johnson adds, “may be the surprising number of global advertisers that actually increased ad spending amid last year’s tumult.”

Dig deeper:  The Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2021 report includes an exclusive ranking of the top 100 advertisers; a ranking of advertisers with the sharpest ad spending increases and decreases; and stats about the top 100 advertisers by category, country and region.

Keep reading here.

See also:  “Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers pump up spending,” from Ad Age Datacenter.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Jobless Claims Rose Last Week But Remained Near Decades-Low,” per The Wall Street Journal.

• “Inflation hits 39-year high—here’s what that means for interest rates,” from Fox Business.

Previously:  “U.S. advertising employment rose by 2,900 jobs in November,” from Ad Age Datacenter.

See also:  “​​Women leaving ad industry at alarming rate,” from Ad Age.

Subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter for essential data and insights on all of the most-advertised brands.

Netflix and app

Measurement and analytics company AppScience is out with new data—shared exclusively with Datacenter Weekly first—about how media consumers are spending their screen time this holiday season. The company is known for serving up intel related to the connected TV and mobile app spaces, and the overlap between them, based on data from 300 million opt-in mobile devices and 55 million CTV households. Leveraging those datasets, AppScience found that: 

• Dating app usage started surging over the Thanksgiving holiday. For instance, Skout usage rose 167% during the weekend after Thanksgiving compared to the previous weekend, while MeetMe usage rose 266% and Grindr saw a 321% usage increase.

• AppScience also looked at CTV viewership among users of dating apps and found that those users also started increasing their TV consumption starting Thanksgiving weekend—most notably watching 44% more channels than the general population.

The bottom line:  If you think of dating apps as a source of content/entertainment—just like TV networks—then perhaps scrolling through profiles is just another form of channel-surfing?

Behind the rankings: Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2021.

ViacomCBS partners with Dentsu

“ViacomCBS announced a new partnership with Dentsu,” Ad Age’s  Ethan Jakob Craft reports, “that will see the media company use VideoAmp data as an alternative currency to measure the effectiveness of some of its clients’ ad campaigns, the latest move in its aggressive exploration of new TV measurement options.”

Essential context:  “The news comes less than three months after ViacomCBS added VideoAmp as a currency alternative to Nielsen for its national linear and connected TV business as part of the company’s pursuit of offering ratings guarantees against multiple measurement options. 

Keep reading here.

See Ad Age’s 2021 Year in Review here.

The 10 biggest worldwide advertisers

We’ve got more for you from the just-released Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2021 ranking (dollars in billions):

We also have rankings/charts for:

• 10 biggest U.S. advertisers
• 10 most-advertised brands in U.S.
• 10 biggest agency companies
• 10 biggest agency networks
• Biggest agency ventures by category

See them all here:  “The Big List: Top marketers, brands and agencies”

See all of Ad Age’s 2021 Marketers of the Year here.

Marketing on purpose

Datacenter Weekly readers are invited to download a free copy of “Brand Purpose,” a new white paper that examines how consumers value brands with a purpose, what media choices can say about a brand, and what Gen Z expects from brands and employers. Ad Age Datacenter produced “Brand Purpose” based on data and analysis from Kantar.

Get it here.

Just briefly

• “Unpacking Omicron—making sense of the data,” from The Economist.

• “Programmatic ad exchange OpenX fined $2 million for collecting children’s data,” from Ad Age.

• “Meta expands bug bounty program to reward discoveries of scraped data,” TechCrunch reports.

• “Samsung debuts first-party data tool for smart TV ad campaigns,” from Ad Age.

• “8 States Honored for Using Data and Evidence to Make Policy Decisions,” per U.S. News & World Report.

• “Most consumers want ‘privacy guaranteed’ seals on digital ads, study finds,” from Ad Age.

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Catherine Wolf.

This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.

Subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter for essential data and insights on all of the most-advertised brands.