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

How Apple commercials help fuel hit songs

Songtradr, the music licensing and management platform, has been parsing data on brands’ use of music in commercials across 2022, and one of the top takeaways won’t come as a surprise: Apple is really good at deploying exactly the right music at the right time in its commercials.

Specifically, Songtradr found that Apple is exceptionally deft at using songs that are rising in popularity but are not yet ubiquitous or overexposed. Two cases in point: “Biggest” by Idris Elba and “The Move” by Space Rangers. The former was featured in an Apple iPhone 14 TV commercial released on Nov. 3 (it continued airing heavily through Nov. 28). The latter was used in another Apple iPhone 14 TV commercial that debuted on Sept. 8 (it continued airing heavily through Nov. 7).

You can hover over the lines in the charts below to reveal specific dates related to the Shazam count for “Biggest” and stream volume on Spotify for “The Move,” as tracked by Songtradr. (The dip in streams for “The Move” correlates to a temporarily reduced level of airings of the Apple ad featuring the song.) The bottom line: Apple is as good at getting consumers excited about music as it is about consumer electronics.

Twitter’s ad crash

“Top media agencies pulled clients’ ad dollars from Twitter in the days after Elon Musk took over the company, leading to a 46% year-over-year decrease in ad sales,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports, adding that “the precipitous drop was an anomaly compared to the rest of the social media ad market, according to Standard Media Index, the advertising analytics firm.”

Essential context: “Standard Media Index tracks monthly invoices of the major media holding companies and a basket of top independent ad agencies,” Sloane adds. “The data is limited to just brands that spend through those firms, so it does not include 100% of Twitter’s advertisers.”

Keep reading here.

Tesla is No. 1 in U.S. luxury auto sales

“An American automaker wears the U.S. luxury sales crown for the first time in nearly a quarter century,” Urvaksh Karkaria of Automotive News (an Ad Age corporate sibling) reports. “After being bested by just 23,244 vehicles in 2021, Tesla grabbed the luxury sales throne from BMW—thumping the German automaker with a 158,612-vehicle lead last year, according to Automotive News Research & Data Center estimates.”

Essential context: “Austin-based Tesla does not break out sales by region or country,” Karkaria notes. “Mercedes-Benz placed third, followed by Lexus, Audi and Cadillac. Tesla delivered an estimated 491,000 vehicles in the U.S. last year, up 44%, and crossed 1 million deliveries globally.”

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Jobless claims fall to 4-month low despite layoffs,” the New York Post reports.

• “Inflation Is Slowing, Good News for American Consumers and the Fed,” from The New York Times.

• “What the latest warehouse data is signaling about inflation and the economy,” per CNBC.

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.

Ad industry sheds jobs

“Employment in advertising, public relations and related services fell by 3,500 jobs in December, the third drop in four months in a sign the ad business is entering a cold winter,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports. “U.S. employment in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) classification of advertising, public relations and related services came in at 480,800 jobs in December based on figures that are not seasonally adjusted.”

Essential context: December’s jobs loss follows “a sharp decline of 7,600 jobs in November,” Johnson notes. “BLS significantly revised the November figure from a preliminary loss of 2,500 jobs it reported a month ago.”

Keep reading for Johnson’s ad industry drill-downs by BLS classifications.

Just briefly

• “FAA Computer Failure Caused by Personnel Who Damaged Data File,” per Bloomberg News.

• “Why multi-currency TV measurement is causing tension within the industry,” from Ad Age.

“NFL season ratings decline 2% as Amazon showings draw fewer viewers,” per Bloomberg News (via Ad Age).

• “China’s COVID-19 Toll Isn’t Public. Satellite Images Seem to Show a Lot of People Are Dying,” Time reports.

• “Marketers’ consumer data may be extremely flawed—how Truthset is aiming to change that,” from Ad Age.

The Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2022 report

“For the first time, the world’s two biggest advertisers are internet companies—one from the U.S., the other from China,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson writes in the introduction to the Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2022 report. (Find out which companies he’s referring to here.) There’s a lot to WLA 2022, but the Datacenter team has come up with a bunch of entry points to help you begin your own deep dive:

• “WLA 2022—What’s inside”
• “WLA 2022—10 key stats”
• “WLA 2022—Category, region and country”
• “WLA 2022—25 biggest advertisers, ranked”
• “WLA 2022—Ad spending growth over time”
• “WLA 2022—Cautious growth as a recession may loom”
• “WLA 2022—Big spending gains and cut”

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.