Ben Young
Ben Young
January 13, 2023

Edition #388

What Wall Street thinks will happen this year and what that might mean for marketers.


Investment banks like Goldman Sachs release annual outlook reports, to keep their clients informed and to drum up business ????. This years report from Goldman is titled Heavy Fog. I thought I’d take a peek, from the lens of a CMO. What can their POV on the markets, provide as intel for marketers. After all, businesses march to the beat of Wall Street.

This is shared more as a touch on some of the topics, with a POV on why it matters or what it means. It’s not investment advice etc, they have a bunch of disclaimers, so do take a peek at the original doc. There is a lot on recession, probability of it, prior recessions. I have not gone deep into that.

First up, the human factor.

The human factor, decision makers feel more pressure

The standard 60/40 stock/bond portfolio was down in 2022. A rare occurrence. But so folks have seen their 401ks drop which may add more pressure to their decision making. To push for more growth, to cut costs. This may be irrational to your situation but is a real thing, if decision makers feel more pressure, they will act accordingly. Senior decision makers have seen some of their peers retire early, cash out of big stock grants, and to see their retirement shrink is nerve wracking. Did they miss out? Fomo is a real force.

Within your own teams, try to be understanding, things will get better. The report even notes, the economy still grew last year, and will in 2023 as well. It’s just noisy.

Wide variance in opinions on a recession likelihood

This is a call that is likely to date very quickly – however the report notes the variance between recession likelihoods.

They conclude with a 45-55% likelihood of a recession in 23. This leaves marketers, on their toes, to cover the downside risk of a recession. But to be nimble should things change. This makes the importance of timely data in a marketing organization all the more valuable.

Stay invested

There was a 2% probability since 1926 that both bonds and equities were down which drives them to suggest to stay invested. To capture as the market changes. And this is a good takeaway for marketers, yes last year was volatile, but this year should be less volatile. And those that will win are those that are in market as it changes, rather than trying to ’time the market’. As by the time you do, its probably too late.

That all being said, marketers are not Wall Street traders and things aren’t nearly as dynamic as, things are up, lets go. But marketing is more real time than it was in the past, and consumers response is near real time.

The economy lags Wall Street pricing of stocks. So Wall Street tends to price in the recovery, before we experience it. So when thinking about your end customers, they are feeling the pain, home affordability is an issue, inflation. It may be the year to champion the consumer and how you can help them through this time.

Notable stories this week

Deals/M&A

Campaign of the week

View all 2022 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

  • “In an environment where people dedicate less than 10 minutes of their attention each day to advertising, we need to find other ways to evaluate engagement”Fernanda Saboya, Director Consumer Connections, Heineken Brazil

Datapoints of note

  • Netflix dominates in new content with 1,160 new tv episodes in Q4.
  • Getting your app featured in a 5 minute segment on a national morning show with 4million viewers, 1000 extra downloads.
  • #1 challenge for content marketers is linking content creation to business outcomes.
  • The attention metric allows brands to be three times more effective at predicting media outcomes than viewability.

That’s it for this week.


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