Facebook is “responsible for the content” on its platform, Zuckerberg says Wow, now that’s quite an admission! Zuckerberg, by implication no longer sees Facebook as an open social platform to enable users to connect and share their own content, but one where Facebook participates in the ownership of that content and can impose its own […]
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Have we given a lunatic the keys to the asylum? Donny ‘Two-Scoops’ recent Tweet on Syria might seem to suggest as much. Even if one were to ignore the playground language of a five year old, the contents were also deeply troubling on several levels. The first and foremost is that the Russians […]
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When DMGT acquired EDR twenty years ago, it must have seemed an exciting proposition, being described at the time as a “leading provider of geographical based environmental risk management information in the US”, particularly given the possible synergies with DMGT’s risk management and catastrophe modelling operations such as RMS. Twenty years later however, revenues have […]
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Well that seemed short-lived. Perhaps the bounce in US equity markets on the February non-farms was just a one day wonder. The numbers however, weren’t too shabby for equity prices; the combination of a better than expected net job growth (including upward revision in the January guesstimate), but with a lower pace of average wage […]
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Having traded out of the stock with a +19% relative gain in the run up to their FY17 results, I didn’t expect to get an opportunity so soon to step back into this one, but with the shares approaching 1,200p (closed 1,204p), that is what I am doing. While there isn’t an immediate catalyst now […]
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Perhaps the cunning plan was to absorb Sky while still carrying a hefty risk premium ahead of the all important Premier League (PL) football rights negotiations and then reap the benefit when these were renewed for what turned out to be -14%/-£199m pa reduction. Unfortunately, with 21st Century Fox’s (21CF) bid stranded with the UK […]
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Add a bit of mean reversion to GrowthRatings, with a healthy pinch of recency bias and you can have a wild ride in these menopausal markets. For example, three weeks ago on this blog I highlighted the unloved Agency sector and in particular WPP. Those listening to what some key marketeers were saying about their […]
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Not all marketing investment seems wasted. After P&G’s earlier withering criticism of its digital marketing ROI, Diageo’s Q2 report yesterday, delivering a combination of rising A&P investment, organic sales growth and underlying operating margins, suggests a more nuanced approach may be needed by investors to the industry’s current problems. Faced with an unsolicited approach from […]
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