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Gen Z among consumers most likely to keep buying during the economic downturn: Datacenter Weekly
Also: Disney’s data deal with Kroger and PepsiCo, macroeconomic news in a nutshell, and more
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Performance marketing company Wunderkind gave Datacenter Weekly an exclusive first look at its new study titled “The Industry Pulse: Consumer Spending During Economic Uncertainty.”
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Disney’s data deal with Kroger and PepsiCo
“Disney Advertising has launched a beta test with Kroger Precision Marketing and PepsiCo that will let packaged-goods marketers use shopper data to reach target audiences across select Disney inventory, starting with Hulu,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports.
The timing: “After starting with a handful of beta advertisers, the program is expected to roll out broadly for CPG marketers in the second half of this year,” Neff adds.
Essential context: “The move comes as packaged-goods marketers are turning to connected TV and retail media to reach audiences that are increasingly hard to find on linear TV and target in digital,” Neff notes. “The impending loss of cookies on Google’s Chrome browser and privacy barriers erected by Apple and others have made retail data such as Kroger’s increasingly valuable.”
Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell
• “US unemployment claims tick up to 245,000, but still low,” ABC News reports
• “Fed’s Williams says inflation is slowing and labor market is cooling,” per MarketWatch
• “Mortgage rates rise for the first time in more than a month,” The Hill reports
Don’t miss: Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news
Previously: US ad employment fell by 2,100 jobs in March—biggest drop in two years
The consumers most likely to keep buying during the downturn
Performance marketing company Wunderkind gave Datacenter Weekly an exclusive first look at its new study titled “The Industry Pulse: Consumer Spending During Economic Uncertainty,” based on a survey of 500 consumers in the U.S. (An additional 500 consumers were surveyed in the U.K., but we’re focusing on the U.S. portion of the study.) Some key findings:
• Across demographics, “52% of U.S. consumers are cutting back on non-essentials, with 37% cutting back on essentials too,” per Wunderkind’s report.
• But Gen Z intends to keep spending: “In the U.S., the younger generation isn’t phased by the economic downturn as they registered the highest levels of consumer confidence, with only 22% stating a need to reduce discretionary spending.”
• “The percentage of high-income U.S. consumers passing on luxury items is a mere 13%. The majority (63%) of this demographic say they have no need to cut back at all,” Wunderkind’s survey found.
Google’s optimistic take on post-cookie targeting
“Google released new data about what the post-cookie future may look like in advertising, revealing a small dip in performance,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports.
The details: Google’s study is meant to show “how ads perform within its ecosystem when they don’t use cookies for ad targeting,” Sloane explains. “Instead of cookies, Google has been developing what it calls the Privacy Sandbox, which is a set of tools that tap into more anonymous, aggregated internet data to target the ads. In this early limited test, Google claimed that the ads performed almost on par with ads that used cookies.”
Essential context: “Google still intends to remove third-party cookies from Chrome at the end of 2024, ditching the online tracking tools in a bid to catch up to privacy measures pushed by other platforms, such as Apple,” Sloane adds.
Just briefly
• “Nielsen’s Media Rating Council TV accreditation restored after 19-month suspension,” from Ad Age
• “Elon Musk threatens to sue Microsoft over using Twitter data for its A.I.,” per CNBC
• “Mike Lindell ordered to pay $5M for losing ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ election data challenge,” NBC News reports
• “TikTok data collection could reveal what floor a user is on, cybersecurity firm says,” from The Guardian
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.
