Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.
Apple’s must-see iPhone privacy ad, and how brands have been scaling up influencer marketing: Datacenter Weekly
How brands are scaling up their influencer marketing
The Tribe Dynamics subsidiary of influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ has shared data with Datacenter Weekly that sheds light on how brands are grappling with the creator economy in their marketing efforts. Tribe Dynamics surveyed executives at 150 brands and found that:
• Slightly more than half (52%) of brands expanded their influencer marketing efforts by investing in new staff in 2021 vs. 2020, while 42% stayed steady and 6% shrunk their teams.
• A sizable majority (70%) of brands say that finding the right creators to partner with is “somewhat” or “very” challenging. But 86% of those surveyed are doing their creator/talent hunting and acquisition in-house, as opposed to outsourcing those efforts.
• Brands are still looking to grow their in-house influencer marketing teams. Some 66% of those surveyed said that they don’t yet have all the necessary team members in place to deliver on plans to scale their brand’s influencer marketing campaigns.
Apple’s must-see iPhone privacy ad
ICYMI: Ad Age Creativity Editor Ann-Christine has the details on Apple’s rather compelling (and disturbing) new ad about data auctions—part of its continuing efforts to position its iPhone as an oasis of data privacy. We’re sharing it here ...
Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell
• “U.S. weekly jobless claims rise; continuing claims lowest since 1969,” per CNBC.
• “U.S. Retail Sales Grew 0.9% in April,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
• “Retailers just sounded an alarm on inflation. It’s worth heeding,” from CNN Business.
• “S&P 500 enters bear market territory—a 20% decline from a recent peak—for the first time since 2020,” per NBC News.
• “New Data Suggests the U.S. Trucking Shortage May Be Ending,” per the Harvard Business Review.
• “What You Need to Know About the US Baby Formula Shortage,” from Bloomberg News.
ICYMI: Ad Age Agency Report 2022
Agencies have come roaring back, with strong revenue growth across disciplines and record-high U.S. ad agency employment. Ad Age’s 78th annual Agency Report shows who’s on top and where the business is growing and going. There’s a lot to Ad Age Agency Report 2022—so the Datacenter team has come up with multiple entry points for you to start your own deep dive. To wit:
• Agency Report 2022: What’s inside
• Agency Report 2022: Biggest companies and networks
• How agency revenue growth soared—and what it means for the industry
• Agency Report 2022: Agency employment
• Agency Report 2022: Agency discipline rankings
• Agency Report 2022: Revenue growth
• An index for the entire Ad Age Agency Report 2022
See also: “Think you know agency-speak? Take our transformational quiz”
Plus: “Ad Age Agency Report 2023 Questionnaire”
Nielsen alternatives can vary widely in their data outputs
“Tests of alternatives to Nielsen’s TV measurement have proliferated like wildflowers after a spring rain,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports. “The idea is that tests will build confidence and eventually lead to using these currencies to actually write deals over the next year. There’s just one problem: As marketers and agencies test, they are learning that audience numbers are all over the place among different vendors and sometimes vary significantly from week to week at the same vendors.”
Essential context: “The wide range of results threatens to impede an industry movement toward applying multiple currencies to write TV and video deals.”
Just briefly
• “5 ways to put brands on the path to first-party data collection success,” from Ad Age.
• “U.S. Senate campaign ad spending surges past half a billion dollars,” from Ad Age Datacenter.
• “Over 1,000 new asteroids found using Hubble archival data - study,” from The Jerusalem Post.
• “Google Is Sharing Our Data at a Startling Scale,” from Bloomberg Opinion.
• “You can now ask Google to remove your personal data from its search results—here’s how,” from CNBC.
• “A Probe In Interstellar Space Is Sending Back Impossible Data, NASA Says,” from Vice Motherboard.
• “How new EU rules could create a safer and more trustworthy online advertising ecosystem,” 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 Joy R. Lee.
This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.