U.S. Ad Market Expands For 11th Month In March (mediapost.com)

Three online advertisers are suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws by monopolizing "digital advertising markets." “Google leveraged its stranglehold on online search and search advertising to gain an illegal monopoly in brokering display advertising on other companies’ websites,” the marketers allege in a class-action complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case was filed on behalf of Washington, D.C. tour company Grand Atlas Tours, Delray Beach, Florida-based Prana Pets (which sells herbs for dogs and cats) and the San Francisco law firm Hanson Law. They claim Google “achieved this market dominance in part by acquiring rivals in the online advertising space, conditioning access to its search-results data and YouTube video advertising platform upon the purchase of its separate display advertising services, and ensuring those systems were not compatible with those of its competitors in online advertising."

In another sign of the toll that macroeconomic disruption has been taking on the ad economy, more than a third of advertisers (35%) say they have reduced their 2022 advertising budgets due to increasing inflation and/or disruptions in their supply chain. While most of the executives who have cut their ad budgets said they have reduced them by less than 20%, the median was 15% among all of them. The good news is the percentage saying they have reduced their 2022 ad budgets due to the economic factors is down from 40% who said so in a similar survey conducted by Advertiser Perceptions in July and August.

The U.S. Ad Market Tracker rose 2.5% in May -- the first expansion in 11 months. The expansion compares with the year-ago period that was only up modestly and is the best May since Standard Media Index began tracking it. The growth is the first material sign that the U.S. ad marketplace is pulling out of a recession that began in July 2022, based on the SMI data, which is derived from a pool of actual ad spending processed by the major agency holding companies and independent media services agencies.