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Murdoch and other people’s money
So you’ve seen the headlines. First Fox’s proposals to consolidate its interests in Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland into BSkyB, described by many as a “tidying up” exercise. Now we are treated to something more substantial to explain the earlier moves; an $80bn (c.$86 ps) plus offer for Time Warner. The newswires are of course […]
Continue readingWhat, no PubicOm?
Shock, horror. “Publicis and Omnicom agree to terminate proposed merger of equals” 10 months ago when Publicis and Omnicom announced their intention to merge I wrote two articles on this blog. The first was titled ‘Omnicom & Publicis – a marriage not made in heaven’ and was an initial response to the press leaks […]
Continue readingPearson disappoints (again) and resorts to the old trick of dropping the adj tax rate
Pearson:  Another update (Jan trading statement) and another slippage in underlying expectations as US educational markets continue to decline and with even the 70p per share FY13 guidance relying on some exceptional massaging of the ‘adjusted’ tax rate. Without an early turn in this market cycle and Pearson’s own internal investment programme unlikely to deliver […]
Continue readingOmnicom & Publicis – a marriage not made in heaven
Business struggles to deliver above market organic growth and therefore resorts to sector consolidation to cut costs and obscure the maturing growth profile. It is a well enough used stratagem. Pharma has been there and done it, Telecom consolidation is currently in full flood and once again, major consolidation is being proposed in the marketing […]
Continue readingInforma starts clearing the decks ahead of new CEO arrival
A Friday announcement ahead of a sunny weekend and in the middle of the results season and school holidays is usually a good time to dribble out some news that you don’t want attracting too much attention. So today we have the announcement by Informa that it is dumping 5 of its training businesses for […]
Continue readingUS jobs growth in June – headline beat misses fall in full time jobs
Hurrah for the recovery in US employment! June’s +202k increase in private sector jobs was ahead of ‘expectations’ and have been spun as a further confirmation of the self-sustaining recovery in the US economy and the planned ‘tapering’ of the Fed’s current $85bn per month of QE life support.  As a consequence the US dollar […]
Continue readingITV – market continues to chase short term data
Accounting for around a third of display advertising and including most of the larger US brands, it should come as little surprise that UK TV advertising would be sensitive to US marketing investment decisions. For those looking at just UK domestic consumption, the rebound in UK TV NAR over the last couple of years may have […]
Continue readingDeteriorating US NFP – a negative lead indicator for marketing investment
US labor laws mean that US companies can hire and fire with relative impunity. Regardless of the longer term advisability of treating what ought to be a longer term resourse as swing capacity, it does afford equity markets with a near real time metric of US corporate investment and an effective lead indicator. When firm’s […]
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