The stock market has been on the minds of more people than usual this year. You almost certainly heard about the stock price of Gamestop going crazy and you may have even heard terms like “diamond hands” thrown around on serious news coverage of congressional hearings. But the investment opportunities of the stock market are much broader than simply riding the wave of a bubble and real investors do a lot of work before deciding where to invest. This post is intended to showcase how our advertising analytics tools can add to the toolbelt of medium to large investors doing their due diligence before buying a stock.
Company Advertising Analysis
To inform this analysis, we took five of the most watched companies by Yahoo Finance users and dove into some of their advertising analytics. The companies are, in order of trade volume, Pfizer, Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, Ford, and Bank of America. Only Ford and Apple currently have ads on air that we’re tracking but we’ll cover what we can learn about companies that aren’t currently on air later. For now, let’s dive into the advertising of Apple and Ford.
Apple
Apple, in terms of ad volume, is far and away the biggest advertiser in the tech space. Currently, as can be seen below, Apple is in a bit of an advertising lull as they tend to be directly before and directly after the release of a new phone. We expect ad volume to continue to fall until about mid-September or whenever the iPhone event is and then slowly tick back up until ads skyrocket prior to black Friday and Christmas. This year, Apple’s advertising has focused on a few unique themes; new iPhone models and features, privacy, and the iPhone camera. The past three months have seen a pivot to other Apple products such as the Apple Watch, the iMac, and the iPad; but the top ad has still been messaging on Apple’s new privacy features.
Ford
Ford, unlike Apple, does not dominate the automotive advertising space. They compete with Toyota for that spot, and due to a late summer surge in advertising by Toyota, probably in part because of their Olympic sponsorship, Toyota has taken the top spot in total market-level ad occurrences over the past twelve months. As far as advertising themes, Ford has remained pretty consistent over the past 12 month. They’re showcasing the range of F-150s, the Mustang Mach-E, and the Bronco. Over the past 3 months while they’ve continued to showcase all three cars, they’ve definitely shifted their ad messaging to showcase their electric and hybrid offerings. The ad volume of Ford right now is also low, this could be a seasonal thing, but is also potentially due to the chip shortage we’re currently experiencing. Over the last twelve months, Ford’s ads peaked during November and December and then again in February and March.
Bank of America and Pfizer
We have not seen Bank of America ad since April and even then, their ad volume was low. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Bank of America isn’t advertising, it just means that they’re not running national ads on cable or running any ads on broadcast. Because local cable is hyper-local and there are so many channels, it’s incredibly hard to track, so it is possible, that Bank of America is running local cable spots in various markets across the country. We actually believe this to be the case, given their low ad volume on broadcast over the past year. Pfizer hasn’t been on air since December of last year and we’re pretty confident that that’s accurate because they used to have relatively high ad volume. None of us can figure out why Pfizer would be off air since December, it’s not like they’re getting a ton of free advertising other sources…
Obviously, nobody should be making any stock buys based on this post, this is just an overview of the data we have. But we hope this highlights the potential for deeper analysis using our data. For example, pairing this data with sales data from earnings calls, comparing companies advertising now to their history or their competitors, or digging deeper into what markets companies are targeting could all be done using our data and lead to some insights to evaluate potential investment. Large investors should consider AdImpact and our advertising analytics tools when doing stock analysis.
