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

Making sense of Amazon’s iRobot/Roomba deal and Clorox’s ad spending

Want some quick, smart analysis on the latest financial data and news from key marketers? Turn to “Ad spending, marketing and financial stats—analyzing the latest data,” the newest Ad Age blog. The headlines of the first two posts will give you a sense of the kind of perspective it’s designed to provide:

• “Amazon was Roomba marketer’s biggest customer long before $1.7 billion deal,” from Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson.

• “Clorox ad spending is down (but it’s really back to normal),” also from Johnson.

Keep reading here.

Generational social commerce comfort levels revealed

Martech company CM Group is out with a new study titled “2022 Digital Consumer Trends by Age Group,” based on a survey of 5,000-plus consumers conducted in partnership with Econsultancy. One key finding, shared first with Datacenter Weekly, is the extent to which different age groups are comfortable with so-called social shopping—aka social commerce.

Per CM Group, “When it comes to driving sales, a post in social media, closely followed by social media advertising, is comfortably the preferred channels for Gen Z and Millennials for receiving offers, content, incentives and rewards from brands. More than half of these younger consumers have made a purchase because of a post on social media in the last 12 months, an uplift on last year and significantly higher than Gen X and Boomers.” The breakdown:

• Gen Z: 51%
• Millennials: 53%
• Gen X: 39%
• Boomers: 23%

See also: “TikTok announces new shoppable ad formats as it prepares for holiday rush,” from Ad Age’s Erika Wheless.

Earlier: “How TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest’s social commerce strategies are performing,” also from Wheless.

Streaming TV beats out cable and broadcast

“Streaming has finally taken the highest share of TV-watching eyeballs, according to Nielsen’s July viewership report—thanks in large part to 18 billion minutes of ‘Stranger Things’ consumption on Netflix during the month,” Ad Age’s Parker Herren reports. “For July, American viewers spent 34.8% of their time exclusively on streaming platforms, more than 190 billion minutes. The share is over 3% higher than streaming numbers in June and a 22.6% increase compared to July 2021.”

Essential context: Right behind streaming is cable at 34.4%, followed by broadcast at 21.6%, Herren notes.

Looking ahead: “Streamers courting advertisers may lean on the Nielsen numbers to make their case, particularly Netflix, which holds the highest percentage of streaming viewership and plans to launch its ad-supported subscription tier in early 2023,” Herren adds.

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Jobless claims drop slightly, with 250,000 Americans filing for unemployment benefits,” per Fox Business.

• “Federal Reserve Officials See Inflation Staying ‘Uncomfortably High,’” The New York Times reports.

• “Five ways the Inflation Reduction Act will reduce business owners’ taxes,” from The Hill.

Don’t miss: “Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news,” Ad Age’s continually updated blog covering how the marketing industry is bracing for a recession.

The measurement mess in depth

If you haven’t yet checked out Ad Age’s new blog titled “Media measurement uncertainty—tracking TV, social and digital,” well, here are a couple of stories in it this week:

• “Spotify will give Megaphone clients free measurement access,” from Ad Age’s Jack Neff

• “Better measurement drives OOH spending surge,” also from Neff.

Keep reading here.

Just briefly

• “Twitter Has to Give Musk Only One Bot Checker’s Data: Its Ex-Product Head,” per Bloomberg News.

• “Capital One $190 Million Data Breach Settlement: Are You Eligible for a Payment?,” from CNET.

• “Trump-allied lawyers pursued voting machine data in multiple states, records reveal,” The Washington Post reports.

• “Waning immunity, not BA.5, fueling most COVID-19 reinfections, data suggests,” from Becker’s Hospital Review.

• “Are monkeypox vaccines getting to people most at risk? It’s hard to tell, but early data isn’t promising,” per CNN.

Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2022

In his introduction to the newly released Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2022 report, Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports that advertisers scored “the second-biggest spending gain on record” in 2021, marking “an extraordinary turnaround from the pandemic plunge in 2020. Spending has continued to grow in 2022, though budgets could come under pressure as marketers grapple with inflation, rising interest rates and slumping consumer confidence amid escalating expectations of a recession.”

There’s a lot to LNA 2022—so the Datacenter team has come up with multiple entry points for you to start your own deep dive. To wit:

• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—10 most-advertised brands in the U.S., ranked”
• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—Will ad spending rise in the (coming) recession? It’s happened before”
• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—25 biggest U.S. advertisers, ranked”
• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—U.S. market leaders and category rankings”
• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—Big spending gains and cuts”
• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—What comes next after 2021's ad spending surge”
• “Leading National Advertisers 2022—Ad spending by medium, category and advertiser”

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.