Omnicom & 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 […]

Informa 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 […]

Chilly without Carney or just burn baby burn?

Before we all get bogged down in the Q2 results season which is beginning to gather pace I think it is good to remind ourselves of one part of the financial burden that is to crush us if interest rates rise to more normalised levels – that is the scale of Govt, household and non-financial […]

More muppets needed

Benanke does some back-peddling on tapering and we’re back to the ‘good’ times again. More easing of course spells a weaker dollar, which after its recent surge, was ripe for some profit taking. On the other side of this trade,  equities and commodities rose, including at last gold.  – nice to see life is now […]

US 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 […]

Bernanke blowing bubbles

ITV – 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 […]

Deteriorating 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 […]