Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals. Reading this online? Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox here.
$$$+
“The financial incentives that have driven millions of Americans to dump cable TV for streaming services are disappearing fast,” Christopher Palmeri and Nick Turner of Bloomberg News report. “If you put together the flagship streaming services from the biggest media and tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc., AT&T Inc., Netflix Inc. and Walt Disney Co., it would now cost you $92 a month in the U.S.”—which is “almost as much as a typical cable-TV subscription” bill.
Bloomberg’s analysis makes certain broad assumptions—e.g., its tally includes the higher-end tiers of some of the services, rather than cheaper ad-supported options—but it also leaves out a bunch of other streaming options, such as AMC+ and Fox Nation, that could help drive a consumer’s monthly bill well above $100.
Keep reading here.
Cuddlebugs
Dating app Tinder is out with a report titled “The Future of Dating Is Fluid” (subhead: “What the last year on Tinder tells us about the next decade of dating”) and it’s... a little heartbreaking (or maybe heartwarming, depending on your mindset). We swiped—er, scrolled—through the report to score some of the more telling insights, including:
• Throughout the pandemic, “Gen Z spent more time talking on Tinder, as 19% more messages were sent per day in Feb. 2021, compared to Feb. 2020. And conversations were 32% longer during the pandemic.”
• “Members also updated their bios more often to fuel conversation, with Gen Z updating their bios nearly 3x as often as they did pre-pandemic and still 2x as often as millennials.”
• “Tinder’s engagement and activity grew significantly throughout the year with 11% more Swipes and 42% more matches per Tinder member. On March 29, 2020, Tinder’s Swipe activity broke 3 billion in a single day, the first time to do so, then broke that single-day, 3-billion record 130 more times in the last year.”
• “The impact of 2020’s touch deprivation is showing up on Tinder, as people have come to seek the most innocent types of physical contact. Members are using their bios to seek out affection like hand holding, cuddling or someone to touch their hair: use of the word ‘cuddle’ grew 23% and ‘hand holding’ is up 22%.”
Keep reading here.
Jobless claims fall
“First-time claims for unemployment insurance unexpectedly fell sharply last week amid signs that hiring has picked up in the U.S. economy,” CNBC’s Jeff Cox reports, citing the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor. “Claims totaled 684,000 for the week ended March 20, the first time the number has been below 700,000 during the COVID-19 era.”
Keep reading here.
Data IRL
Ally Schweitzer, a reporter at WAMU, a public radio station in Washington, D.C., takes a fascinating look at the physical impact of data processing in a DCist post headlined “The Pandemic Is Driving A Data Center Boom In Northern Virginia.” That part of the Old Dominion state is packed with tech companies, which have been expanding their server-farm footprints rapidly to meet demand, as tracked by commercial real estate firm JLL. Schweitzer writes,
All the Zooming, Slacking and online shopping that people are doing during the pandemic is having a big impact on the Northern Virginia suburbs. ... Hulking, high-security data centers hogged up almost 18 million square feet of real estate in Northern Virginia at the end of last year, per JLL. That’s equivalent to about 30,000 small studio apartments, or more than 7,000 single-family homes. Another 5.7 million square feet were under construction at that time, and the firm expects 11.6 million square feet to be added in future years.
Keep reading here.
ICYMI
“Worldwide ad spending for 23 travel companies analyzed by Ad Age Datacenter tumbled 60.2% in 2020,” Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports. “The drop in ad spending tracked closely with revenue, which sank 61.5%.”
Johnson goes on to offer a deep dive into ad spending by a range of travel-related sectors, including airlines, hotels, car rental companies, cruise lines and casinos. Keep reading here.
A key takeaway: “There are hopeful signs for travel this year, including an increase in airline traffic and rising bookings at major theme parks,” Johnson adds. “Stocks have rebounded as investors bet on a recovery in travel.”
Just briefly
• More NFT mania: “How an ad collector paid $2 for a Pringles NFT, and sold it for close to $1,500,” from Ad Age.
• COVID continues: “U.S. tops 30M coronavirus infections, JHU data shows,” per Fox News, citing the latest numbers from Johns Hopkins University.
• Vax populi: “What to make of the AstraZeneca vaccine data—and the surrounding controversy,” per Stat.
• The migrant crisis in context: “Data: How the latest spike in migrants at U.S.-Mexico border compares to past years,” from KSAT San Antonio.
• The rent is (still) too damn high: “Here’s the latest data on San Francisco rent prices after one year of the pandemic,” per the San Francisco Chronicle.
• And finally... there’s still time to enter: “Small Agency Awards entries are now open,” from Ad Age.
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 Catherine Wolf.
This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.
