Summary

The main challenge that advertisers will face in 2019 is tighter regulation of the digital advertising market. Data privacy, data protection, fake news, copyright, and tax avoidance are all areas that regulators are likely to target over the next 12 months. At the heart of the regulatory debate is the question of whether the big tech giants - like Google, Facebook, and others - should retain their legal status as neutral content aggregation platforms (which are not subject to heavy regulation) or be re-classified as publishers (which are).

Effective tax rates for some of the larger tech giants in the digital advertising space may also rise as governments all over the world mull over the concept of taxing local revenues rather than local profits.

While big tech companies are better equipped and more diversified to navigate these uncertain times, their compliance costs are almost certain to rise. For example, they may be required to build more local data centers.

Our thematic scoring methodology is designed to identify tomorrow’s leaders rather than today’s incumbents, based on their competitive position in the most important themes impacting their industry.

To do this, we score the top 600 TMT companies against 60 investment themes, creating a database of 36,000 thematic scores - our thematic engine - to help us identify the strongest and weakest players in each sector over the next two years, once all relevant themes have been taken into account.

Scope

- This report is a sector scorecard, which identifies those companies most likely to succeed in a world filled with disruptive threats. Inside, we predict how each theme will evolve and who the leading and lagging companies are.
- It includes a theme map that shows the 60 biggest themes driving growth in the tech, media and telecom sectors.
- It explains how some of the largest listed players in the sector have performed over the last four years.
- It looks at major technology, macro-economic, and regulatory themes impacting advertising companies.

Reasons to buy

- Companies who invest in the right themes become success stories; those who miss the big themes end up as failures.
- Corporate executives and investors who want to outperform their competitors need to understand all the themes that impact their sector.
- However, many of these themes are, by definition, outside of the core competencies of company boardrooms because they typically originate from external industries.
- This Advertising Sector Scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the traditional and digital advertising industries over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Companies Mentioned
Adobe
Airmedia
Alibaba
Alliance Data Systems
Alphabet
Altaba
Amazon
Angie's List
Baidu
ChannelAdvisor
Cheil
Clear Channel
comScore
Criteo
Dentsu
Facebook
HubSpot
Interpublic
JC Decaux
Lamar Advertising
M&C Saatchi
Marchex
Nielsen
Omnicom
Outfront Media
Publicis
Rightmove
Rubicon Project
Trade Desk
TripAdvisor
Twitter
Verizon
Vivendi
WPP
Yahoo! Japan
Yandex
Yelp