The TikTok effect on influencer marketing, by the numbers: Datacenter Weekly

Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

That’s the current price of a 30-second commercial during NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” as Ad Age’s Parker Herren reports in “What TV commercials cost in the 2022-23 season.” In addition to revealing the price tags for commercial time in 60 other primetime shows, Herren serves up big-picture insights, including:

• “The cost to air a 30-second commercial on primetime TV has declined as the industry navigates precarious economic conditions as well as an ongoing shift of viewers to streaming.”

• “Of the 61 returning series across ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and The CW (plus one from Amazon Prime Video) tracked by Ad Age, 30 saw the cost for a 30-second ad fall by more than 5% compared to last season, while 20 remained relatively on par, and 11 saw a price increase greater than 5%.”

• “NBC is home to four out of the 10 most priciest shows on broadcast TV.”

“Coca-Cola Co. boosted worldwide ad spending by 12.2% in the first nine months of 2022,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports in the latest addition to Ad Age’s “Ad spending, marketing and financial stats” blog. “Ad spending in the first three quarters suggests the beverage marketer’s full-year 2022 spending should come in at roughly $4.6 billion to $4.7 billion, according to Ad Age Datacenter’s calculations. Coca-Cola is on track to top the record $4.2 billion it spent in 2019.”

• “U.S. Jobless Claims Rose Slightly Last Week,” per The Wall Street Journal.

• “U.S. GDP accelerated at 2.6% pace in Q3, better than expected as growth turns positive,” CNBC reports.

• “​​Fed’s soothsayers see signs of an inflation downshift,” Reuters reports.

Don’t miss: “Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news,” Ad Age’s continually updated blog covering how the marketing industry is bracing for a recession. ICYMI: “Ad employment fell sharply in September following summer boom,” from Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson.

CreatorIQ gave Datacenter Weekly a first look at new research that shows just how rapidly TikTok has been rising as a platform for brand-driven influencer marketing. A few key data points from a study it will release next week:

• More than half—52%—of brand campaigns tracked on the CreatorIQ platform included TikTok influencer activations in August 2022. That’s up from 31% in August 2021. (CreatorIQ works with more than 800 brands, as well as agencies and agency holding companies including WPP and IPG.)

• The volume of brand-sponsored creator/influencer posts tracked by CreatorIQ rose 76.5% year over year. (The period measured was Sept. 1, 2021, through Aug. 31, 2022, relative to the previous 12 months.)

• #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt—an organic trend about, well, consumerism that a lot of brands have been jumping on—just keeps growing and growing. CreatorIQ has seen 164% year-over-year growth in all creator content tagged #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, and 83% year-over-year growth in the number of brands participating in #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt. See also: “Current TikTok trends that brands can follow,” from Ad Age’s Gillian Follett.

“Amazon is making changes to its marketing cloud—a data clean room,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports from the e-commerce giant’s three-day unBoxed event that began on Wednesday and wraps up today.

The details: Among the changes is “a new way to use Amazon Marketing Cloud” that will allow brands to “bring in more signals—data about sponsored display campaigns and other insights—in order to measure campaign performance,” Sloane adds.

Essential context: “Amazon’s Marketing Cloud is similar to Google’s Ads Data Hub, and it is among a growing class of ‘clean rooms’ cropping up in the ad industry,” Sloane explains. “Clean rooms are being deployed so brands and publishers ... can match data sets without technically revealing sensitive data to the other party.” Keep reading here.

“Meta’s ad business took a hit in the third quarter,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports, “with revenue dropping year over year for the second period in a row, an unprecedented sequence of declines for the company, and the tough times do not appear to be abating.”

The details: “Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Quest VR, revealed that it generated nearly $27.24 billion in ad revenue in the third quarter, down from nearly $28.3 billion a year earlier,” Sloane notes.

Essential context: “Ad revenue makes up the bulk of the company’s total revenue, which was $27.7 billion in the quarter,” Sloane adds. “Meta predicted total revenue of $30 billion to $32.5 billion for the current fourth quarter, marked by the holidays. That level would represent another decline from a year ago, when total revenue was $33.67 billion.”

See also: “Meta’s Instagram users reach 2 billion, closing in on Facebook,” per Bloomberg News (via Ad Age).

• “Report: 90% of companies have increased budget for web data this past year,” from VentureBeat reports.

• “This chip transmits an internet’s worth of data every second,” from The Washington Post.

In his introduction to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2022 report, Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports that advertisers scored “the second-biggest spending gain on record” in 2021, marking “an extraordinary turnaround from the pandemic plunge in 2020. Spending has continued to grow in 2022, though budgets could come under pressure as marketers grapple with inflation, rising interest rates and slumping consumer confidence amid escalating expectations of a recession.”

There’s a lot to LNA 2022—so the Datacenter team has come up with multiple entry points for you to make your own deep dive. To wit:

• “LNA 2022—10 most-advertised brands in the U.S., ranked” • “LNA 2022—Will ad spending rise in the (coming) recession? It’s happened before” • “LNA 2022—25 biggest U.S. advertisers, ranked” • “LNA 2022—U.S. market leaders and category rankings” • “LNA 2022—Big spending gains and cuts” • “LNA 2022—What comes next after 2021's ad spending surge” • “LNA 2022—Ad spending by medium, category and advertiser”

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.