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

TV’s top commercial celebs

TV measurement company iSpot.tv pulled together the following ranking of the 10 most-seen celebrities in TV commercials year-to-date exclusively for Datacenter Weekly. The list ranks the stars by TV ad impressions across national brand commercials, and it focuses on celebrities being themselves, basically—as opposed to actors playing specific characters (e.g., Progressive’s Flo, Allstate’s Mayhem). We’ve listed the top brand driving exposure for each celebrity in parentheses.

1. Cecily Strong (Verizon)
2. Shaquille O’Neal (The General)
3. Stephen Curry (Subway)
4. Melissa McCarthy (Booking.com)
5. Ted Danson (Consumer Cellular)
6. Kevin Hart (Chase Freedom)
7. Seth Meyers (Verizon)
8. Peyton Manning (Nationwide)
9. Ben Barnes (T-Mobile)
10. Alton Brown (Neuriva)

The fine print: For the purpose of this analysis, we’ve excluded network/show promos and movie trailers, as well as voiceover-only appearances by celebrities.

10 million

That’s the number of users who signed up for Meta’s new text-centric social platform Threads—Mark Zuckerberg’s challenge to Elon Musk’s Twitter—within the first 7 hours, per Politico.

Related coverage: How Meta is pitching Threads to advertisers

Also see: How Threads is poised to steal Twitter advertisers

The top U.S. advertisers

“The top 200 U.S. advertisers raised their spending on ad and marketing services by 8.0% in 2022, reaching a record $210 billion,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson writes in his introduction to Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2023, our 68th annual report on marketers and marketing. “The growth in 2022 was more moderate compared to the surge in spending seen in 2021, when the top 200 advertisers ramped up their spending by 19.7% as the ad market recovered from the pandemic-induced downturn in 2020.”

Below, a glimpse of the 10 biggest spenders. For a deeper dive—and for in-depth details on all 200 marketers in LNA 2023—start here.

10 biggest U.S. advertisers

By estimated 2022 total U.S. ad spending. Dollars in billions. 
See expanded data and analysis.

Source: Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2023 (June 2023). Numbers rounded.
© Copyright 2023 Crain Communications Inc.

Ad agency employment hits all-time high

Today’s U.S. jobs report showed ad industry employment hitting its highest level since 2001.

“Ad agency employment scored a slim gain of 300 jobs, but that was enough to take ad agency staffing to an all-time high,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson writes. “For the overall economy, U.S. employers added 209,000 jobs in June, according to the monthly employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “U.S. jobless claims climb to 248,000 after big increases in Michigan and New York,” per MarketWatch

• “US Job Market Shows Fresh Strength With ADP and Layoff Data,” Bloomberg News reports

• “Fed Officials Were Wary About Slow Inflation Progress at June Meeting,” per The New York Times

• “Why Interest Rates Don’t Cool Inflation Enough: They Hit the Wrong Places,” from The Wall Street Journal

Don’t miss: Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news

See also: Advertising Salary Guide—why commerce jobs are in demand despite a tough economy

First-party data x generative AI

“First-party data and generative AI may seem like two unrelated spaces, but Amazon Web Services is already envisioning ways that they can come together,”  Ad Age’s Asa Hiken writes in setting the stage for his interview with Jon Williams, global head of agency business development at AWS. Hiken notes that in late June, AWS announced “a partnership with Omnicom that will incorporate Bedrock, among other AI products, into the ad holding company’s Omni marketing platform.” (Bedrock is “a tool that combines numerous AI models so that customers can build their own generative AI applications,” per Hiken.)

Hiken spoke with Williams about the Omnicom relationship, what responsible AI development looks like, and more. Williams also offered his take on the newly launched AWS Generative AI Innovation Center:

“The Innovation Center provides agency customers, as well as customers from other verticals, with machine learning science and strategy expertise, which will help them experiment and use generative AI across their businesses,” Williams told Hiken. “It will help them to understand and select what use cases to experiment with, to improve accuracy in AI models that we just talked about and to fine-tune and customize the models for use cases—which is going to be key for advertising.”

Keep reading here.

Just briefly

• “How to download your Twitter data,” from Android Police

• “How to Train Generative AI Using Your Company’s Data,” from Harvard Business Review

• “In case there was any doubt, Google’s privacy policy now explicitly states that it’s going to suck up all your data to train its AI,” per PC Gamer

• “June’s record-smashing temperatures—in data,” from Nature

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.