In Mad Men, the series created by Matthew Weiner, we were told about the day-to-day life of an advertising agency in the 50s between smoking men and secretaries who aspired to have a minimum capacity for professional development. Today, luckily, many of those things have changed. On average, people smoke less and, although there is still a long way to go, the labor inequality between genders is not so blatant. What has also radically changed if someone wanted to bring that series up to date is that its creatives would work on their ideas to be projected on completely different channels.
It has become commonplace and obvious – and sometimes too narrow-minded – that Google is the world's largest advertising agency. Their income responds in an almost alarming percentage for the company itself of the many ways it has to serve advertising through its search engine and its many other services. But it is that, in addition to Google or Facebook, now Amazon is also an advertising giant of colossal dimensions.
Such has been the turn of the tables, that all the publicity generated by global television, press and other media such as radio are equal to or less than the weight of some of these companies alone.
Only Google earns more from advertising than all the media in the world
In its latest results, and as Google did with YouTube a few years ago, Amazon revealed for the first time the figures broken off from its extensive, although perhaps not so apparent, advertising business. Your income, mainly from internal advertising on your marketplace but also with other channels. It is similar to YouTube or all digital and physical newspapers.
Specifically, Amazon reported advertising revenue of $9.7 billion in the fourth quarter, up 32% from last year, and $31 billion for all of 2021.
The comparison, made by analyst Benedict Evans, was that this made Amazon's advertising revenue similar in size to the entire global newspaper industry.
Amazon runs ads on its website and on the screens of some of its tablets, using its customers' search queries to help target ads. Those ads are usually from companies that sell in your market. Added to this is the incipient ad market on Twitch.
The business is similar to that of Google, but focused on its function as an online store. Google, the giant, is by itself and separately. And it is that by joining its search advertising (the sponsored results that appear at the beginning when you enter something in your search engine), its display network and YouTube itself, it earns more from advertising than all the televisions in the world.
Netflix, to make a parallel, also enters a figure similar to world radio. Netflix, if there are no ads on its platform, we might think. And so it is, there are no implicit and its greater profit is logically linked to subscriptions, but it also has advertising in a more hidden way.
Advertising, also a battlefield between big-tech
With these numbers, it is also normal that advertising has become a floating element to direct torpedoes between the companies themselves.
Apple's privacy changes have directly affected Facebook (now Meta), while Google has long wanted to find a substitute for third-party cookies (from FLOC it has now moved to a system it calls Topics) in order to continue strengthening its position thanks to having a technology that the rest would not have.
In recent years we have also known deep alliances such as Blue Jedi, in which Google and Facebook joined forces to continue sharing the majority of the cake.
Apparently, Google gave a series of advantages to Facebook and its advertising network so that it would have priority in the purchase and appearance of its advertising spaces throughout the internet, the well-known Google Ads programmatic advertising banners, to the detriment of other advertisers and partners. .
In return, Facebook would drop plans to create its own programmatic advertising system outside of its own social networks. A way to keep the sheep in the same fold and fully share the cake.
