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

Retail media network boom continues despite Google’s cookie reprieve

“Retail media networks generated a surge in cookie-less advertising this year, according to data from ad tech firm 33Across and marketing analytics firm WARC,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports. “The new stats seemed to dispel early fears that Google’s pause on killing cookies last month would dampen the retail media boom.”

The details: “Retail media advertising will grow 21.3% year over year, according to WARC. Since 2019 it has doubled to a $152.6 billion market,” Sloane reports. Also, “Retailers are more proactive with cookie-less advertising than other sectors, according to 33Across CEO Eric Wheeler. Retailers allocated 30% of their programmatic ad spend to cookie-less pathways through 33Across in the second quarter, an increase of 173% year over year.”

Essential context: Retail media networks, Sloane notes, “all rely on first-party data about consumers, collected by retailers and other industries, to target ads instead of using invasive third-party cookies. But when Google gave a lifeline to cookies in its Chrome browser last month, there was some talk that one of the losers in that move would be retail media, since brands could continue to lean on cookies for programmatic advertising functions.”

Keep reading here.

Also read: Ad Age’s guide to retail media networks

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Layoffs remain low as first-time jobless claims decline,” MarketWatch reports

• “The typical U.S. worker out-earned inflation by $1,400 a year, data shows,” per NBC News

• “Mortgage rates fall to their lowest since April 2023. Here’s where rates could head next,” from CBS News

Also see: Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news

Attention spans are getting (slightly) longer on TikTok and YouTube

Social video analytics firm Tubular Labs is out with its “The State of Social H2 2024” report. Among the key takeaways:

• Attention spans are growing (a bit). Tubular tracked 39% year-over-year growth in uploads of videos 1 to 2 minutes long on TikTok and 39% year-over-year growth in uploads of videos 30 seconds to 1 minute in length on YouTube (July 1, 2023–July 1, 2024 compared to July 1, 2022–July 1, 2023). Compared to super-short videos (less than a minute on TikTok and less than 30 seconds on YouTube), the longer-form videos on both platforms are showing more engagement—including more views per video, more reactions and more comments. “Short-form content has reigned supreme over the past few years,” the Tubular report notes. “But as social media audiences move away from traditional TV and seek longer, more meaningful content on social media, longer content is regaining popularity.”

• The fastest-growing content categories on TikTok year-over-year are beauty (up 22%), music (+30%) and business & finance (+73%).

• Gameplay content—“a type of content that shows in-game footage, demonstrating how a video game is played,” as Tubular defines it—hit 6 billion total views on YouTube in June, marking an all-time high.

• The most-viewed sport on YouTube during the Paris Olympics: gymnastics, bar none—with 1.1 billion views. (Track & field was a distant second with 543 million views.)

What entry-level ad jobs pay these days

 In “Advertising salary guide—inside entry-level job openings,” Ad Age’s Lindsay Rittenhouse does a deep dive into ad industry job listings—and also cites various industry experts who keep a close eye on entry-level salaries, including Francesca Piancone and Sarah Latz, the founders and directors of the online six-month ad portfolio school Book180.

“The average New York salary for a junior professional,” Rittenhouse writes, “is between $65,000 and $75,000 a year, according to Piancone and Latz. Compared to other cities … that’s in line with what Los Angeles junior advertising jobs pay, but is 15% to 20% higher than Chicago junior salaries, which are more in the range of $55,000 to $65,000 a year.”

Rittenhouse also writes about required skills, job experience minimums and more in her piece.

Keep reading here.

Just briefly

• “New Google tools to boost first-party data strategies,” from Search Engine Land

• “Can Meta clean up its data centers with geothermal energy?” asks The Verge

• “Dentsu enriches sports marketing data strategy with Sports Innovation Lab,” per Marketing Dive

• “Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple’s AI Scraping,” Wired reports

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 Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.