JSB Media, LLC’s Post

As of the most recent financial reporting, Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, continues to demonstrate robust financial health, driven largely by its diversified business model and continued dominance in the digital advertising space. For the third quarter of 2023, Alphabet reported a revenue of $76.05 billion, marking a year-over-year increase of approximately 11%. This growth underscores the resilience of the company's core advertising business, even in the face of economic uncertainties and increased competition. A significant portion of this revenue stems from Google's advertising segment, which includes revenues from Google Search, YouTube ads, and the Google Network. The advertising business alone generated $58.91 billion for the quarter, reflecting strong demand from advertisers looking to leverage Google's extensive reach and sophisticated targeting capabilities. This segment's performance has been bolstered by ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have enhanced ad effectiveness and user engagement. Moreover, Google Cloud remains a critical growth driver for Alphabet. The cloud division reported revenues of $8.41 billion, representing a 20% increase compared to the same period last year. This growth highlights the company's successful pivot towards enterprise solutions and its expanding footprint in the cloud computing market, positioning it as a formidable competitor to industry leaders like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The continuous investment in infrastructure and a comprehensive suite of cloud-based services have contributed significantly to this upward trajectory. In terms of profitability, Alphabet posted a net income of $19.69 billion for the third quarter, significantly up from the previous year’s $13.91 billion. This rise in profit can be attributed to both revenue growth and better cost management strategies across various segments of the business. The company's operating margin also saw an improvement, reaching 30%, indicating enhanced operational efficiency. In summary, Alphabet's latest financial results reflect its strong market position and strategic investments in key growth areas such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The continued strength of its advertising business and the rapid expansion of Google Cloud are pivotal to its sustained financial performance. As the company navigates through an evolving digital landscape, its robust financial standing provides a solid foundation for future innovation and growth.

Even amid Google's delayed cookie deprecation plans, this is the year for ad industry transformation. Companies need to consider whether they do that through M&A or other one-time investments. MadTech CEO Bob Walczak explains the pros & cons of each approach in AdExchanger today. https://lnkd.in/dFCE-hdU

"[Jerry] Dischler [VP of ads] and his team discussed how they were “shaking the cushions” to find potential changes to the ad auctions that would ensure Google met the revenue targets that Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat had conveyed to Wall Street for the quarter." For my entire career, I've worked closely with #googleads either directly as a media buyer or closely analyzing media performance from Google and other channels. This week's testimony from Google's ads boss is nothing media buyers didn't already know implicitly from seeing our numbers month after month, but it still feels both startling and vindicating to see this in print. How far Google has fallen from their founding ideals, the below quote taken from Larry and Sergey's original IPO letter - "Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near term financial returns are not obvious. For example, we make our services as widely available as we can by supporting over 90 languages and by providing most services for free. Advertising is our principal source of revenue, and the ads we provide are relevant and useful rather than intrusive and annoying. We strive to provide users with great commercial information. We are proud of the products we have built, and we hope that those we create in the future will have an even greater positive impact on the world. Long term focus As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to “make their quarter.” In Warren Buffett’s words, “We won’t ‘smooth’ quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you.” ------- With this week's testimony, it is now clear that Google purposefully degrades the advertiser experience in direct pursuit of short-term gains. I will be following the outcome of this case with great interest. https://lnkd.in/dX2jHPBf

The shift from third-party to first-party data infrastructure will impact every aspect of your business, the winners and losers will be decided based on how they react to this moment.

Once publishers invest in first-party data assets, there are a host of ways to safely monetize these investments. What else can publishers do with their first-party data assets? Read on... #firstpartydata #publishers #cookielessfuture https://lnkd.in/eJcZHJXr

Many marketers discuss cost caps and their role in scaling accounts. However, based on my experience with various setups, I was hesitant to test this method for this particular account. For almost three months, I went back and forth with a client who was eager to try cost caps, despite my warnings that they might not be effective for our account. Eventually, I agreed to the client's insistence on testing cost caps. We decided to launch a batch of creatives on December 20th with cost caps, followed by 13 creative batches on January 8th. The results were disappointing. From the very beginning, we observed zero spend, and this trend continued past January 8th. Despite incrementally increasing the cap by 5% daily, reaching 2.5 times our target CPA, the ad sets still did not spend adequately. What now? We've effectively lost a lot of time with no spending and 0 sales. Fortunately, Google's performance during this period was strong, offsetting some of our losses. The key takeaway is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach in marketing. Keep this in mind when you come across a case study that seems easily applicable to you. #facebookads #costcap #marketing

Let's talk about ROAS. Anyone investing in Ads does so because they expect a return on their investment, but how do you know when an "Ads expert" is promising too much? Running ads is fundamentally about collecting data, especially for businesses with little to no digital presence. By investing money to spread your message, you can discover where your customers are and what captures their attention. The ad process acts as an experiment, allowing us to test various concepts and gather the data needed to make informed decisions like where to focus the majority of your budget. If a contractor promises a high ROAS right off the bat, proceed with caution. While putting $1 in and getting $5 back is possible, that doesn't happen before gathering a ton of data by testing ads. #PaidAds #PaidAdvertising

In an era where every advertising dollar counts, #Finance businesses are turning to the #OpenWeb to grow. Uncover the advantages of integrating this channel into your media strategy in our latest blog post by Joe Addona: https://outbra.in/4be0BGI

Let’s talk scaling your ad spend for a moment… It’s usually the #1 goal of our clients. We need to scale asap. They think scaling is going to solve their problems. Often times it highlights the problems and makes them bubble to the surface. 🚚 Do you have issues with shipping? Scaling will hurt you. ☎️ Issues with customer service? Scaling might crush you. 💸 Issues with your website? Might as well light your money on fire 👋🏼 👋🏼 This is why we like to scale a little more methodically than some. It allows us to identify issues, fix them and then scale up more to see if the fixes hold. We did this with a recent client. We slowly scaled their spend WoW for a month. After some changes were made we are at their new threshold with spend and their account and website are loving it. Sales are up 55% Spend is up 22% CPA is down 38% All good things. These numbers could have skewed heavily the opposite way. So if you feel like you’re stuck scaling your ad account or maybe you aren’t sure if you’re set up to scale, I’d love to talk more. Book a free consult here: https://lnkd.in/gVkZ2rYA

This is a troubling trend, in my view. Agencies acting as both buyer and seller of media is a conflict of interest for their clients -- unless it is done with full transparency and approval. But I question if that really happens for all clients. This started years ago and was positioned by the agency as a way to get lower costs for their clients as they use their size and clout to get rock bottom rates which they pass along (with a small markup, of course). But as Nick Manning points out here -- these are rock bottom rates for bottom of the barrel inventory that likely improve the efficiency on paper, but have no real impact on brand sales. If you are a large global advertiser, logistically it makes sense to work with these holding company agencies, but you'll need airtight contracts and strong oversight of your agency partner(s) to ensure you know exactly what you're paying for. For other advertisers, you may be working with smaller independent agencies and this may be less of an issue. The practice of reselling media is a risk to any agency, but likely too big of a risk (or not feasible) for these smaller shops. But this practice should be on your radar. Airtight contracts and strong oversight is always a good practice for all advertisers. Trust, but verify.