The New York Times Company and Amazon Announce Licensing Agreement 

The postal price increases in the near term have proven to be a failure. The USPS modeling predicted that revenue would increase and demand wouldn't fall. However, the data tells a different story. In 2023, revenue of “marketing mail” decreased by $920 million and volume decreased by 7.7 billion pieces. The USPS produced and relied on an economic model that proved to be wrong. Mail volume fell for “marketing mail” and the result was a loss in top-line revenue and a bottom-line loss of $1.6 billion. These losses prove that the postage increases were counterproductive and need to be rolled back. The USPS is a classic fixed cost business where incremental volume is highly profitable because the increased volume has little incremental cost. The postage increases for marketing mail clearly resulted in the huge volume declines between 2022 and 2023. The losses from volume declines were not made up by the postage increases.

Google has built an ad-measurement tool that connects with marketers’ first-party data and is designed to work without browser cookies and other data tools that measure performance based on old methods. Google Ads Data Manager -- the measurement tool announced Wednesday -- will become available in Google Ads early next year. The product roadmap includes rolling it into other Google platforms as the company continues to streamline the management and use of first-party data. Advertisers will learn about connecting data sources and ensuring consumer data privacy as the advertising industry heads into the new year, and Google deprecates third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users globally in the first quarter of 2024.

Even as U.S. consumer price inflation has begun moderating, advertisers and planners and buyers are seeing their costs move in the opposite direction -- especially for TV and "print" media -- according to just-released first quarter media price inflation estimates form ECI Media Management. While TV ad costs continue to be under water and moving in a deflationary direction, the erosion of TV ad pricing power has improved from -5.1% in 2023 to -3.1% this year, according to ECI's tracking. Despite improvements in TV, newspaper and magazine prices, the overall cost of U.S. media has declined from a 1.5% inflation rate in 2023 to a 1.4% rate in 2024, with the main drivers being digital and out-of-home media, though radio has been inching up too.