Report: Pandemic Supercharged Advertising 'Triopoly'

When the pandemic upended the economy last year, companies took a hard look at their advertising plans.

The Wall Street Journal reports Oreos maker Mondelez International Inc. shifted money meant for TV commercials during March Madness basketball and the Summer Olympics into digital platforms. A hefty chunk went to Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which offered data on what locked-down snack lovers were searching for.

Athleisure company Vuori Inc. more than tripled its spending on Facebook Inc., spotting a chance to juice sales of its sweatpants to people stuck at home. Office-furniture maker Steelcase Inc. built an operation to sell directly to workers and advertised aggressively on Amazon.com Inc.

WSJ 3/20/21

The Big Three of digital advertising—Google, Facebook and Amazon—already dominated that sector going into 2020. The pandemic pushed them into command of the entire advertising economy. According to a provisional analysis by ad agency GroupM, the three tech titans for the first time collected the majority of all ad spending in the U.S. last year.

Beneath the shift are changes driven by the pandemic: more time spent on computer screens; more e-commerce; a jump in new-business formation, and a steady improvement in tech giants’ ability to demonstrate a return on ad investment.

Success breeds success for what some call the “triopoly.” The increase in shopping and spending on Google, Facebook and Amazon’s platforms is adding to their already voluminous data on users, giving them even more appeal for advertisers that look to target their messages.

“These companies that are data-science-driven get stronger and faster with a tailwind of usage—and Covid was a hurricane,” said ad-industry veteran Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive and AOL chief executive who now leads Flowcode, a direct-to-consumer platform company.

Many of the pandemic-driven changes likely are here to stay, say advertisers and ad forecasters. Still, when the pandemic winds down, it’s far from certain the tech giants will continue to increase their market share gains at this rate. 

The growth in online advertising last year came as every other kind of ad spending shrank, with double-digit declines in television, newspapers and billboards, according to GroupM. And those online gains flowed heavily to the tech giants rather than to digital media sites and publishers that sell online ads.