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Cross-party support for an 11th hour amendment to the Online Safety Bill’s Commons report stage has forced the Government to agree that a new criminal liability for tech executives will be added in the Bill’s passage through the Lords.

The proposed amendment cites faulty precedents, including in financial services, and a new, not yet established Irish online safety regime that is lengthy in procedural steps before criminal sanction.

The introduction of criminal liability will not strengthen the safety objectives of the bill. It is at odds with the approach of the wider regulation, and is practically unworkable.

The amended Online Safety Bill contains sensibly scaled back provisions for “legal but harmful” content for adults, retaining the objectives of removing harms to children and giving users more choice. However, this comes at the expense of enhanced transparency from platforms.

News publishers have won further protections: their content will have a temporary ‘must-carry’ requirement pending review when flagged under the Bill’s content rules. Ofcom must keep track of how regulation affects the distribution of news.

The Bill could be further strengthened: private communications should be protected. Regulators will need to keep up with children’s changing habits, as they are spending more time on live, interactive social gaming.

The post-pandemic recovery has lifted vacancies to a high of 1.27 million, at critical levels in hospitality and health—sectors impacted by the exodus of EU workers. We expect recruitment advertising for private sector roles to have risen 13% in 2022 to £746 million (noting base effects from lockdown in H1 2021), and will decline c.4% in 2023.

LinkedIn dominates recruitment advertising directed at professionals, leveraging its free global networking service. Indeed anchors the other end of the skills spectrum, which is low value and high volume, aggregating openings to create a scale proposition for jobseekers, using technology to target and match them with employers.

Specialists are surviving Indeed’s technology-driven business model by relying on human expertise and ancillary HR services to differentiate. Agencies continue to specialise in supplying workers to large employers for temporary positions. News publishers have retained a small but dwindling slice of recruitment advertising.

Magazine publishers are at different stages of a transformation cycle, but a variety of external and industry factors are massively accelerating change.

Often described as the transition from page to screen, in reality transformation is a deeper redefinition of each brand’s community and purpose, and the use-case benefits it delivers.

Online advertising is evolving into a space where trusted consumer media can exploit their advantages of community engagement and premium context, rather than indiscriminate traffic.

Online advertising growth at big tech firms has flatlined, with real-term declines at Meta and YouTube. The weakness is concentrated in higher funnel ads.

Advertising is a leading indicator. A hardware slowdown is coming, services growth is stuttering, and businesses will want to save on cloud services.

Investors are hostile to attempts to spend through a downturn, but competition from TikTok and developments in AI demand targeted investment, while Meta is pot-committed to the metaverse. Tech giants are looking for savings elsewhere.

 

60% of Chinese online ad spend is directly driven by ecommerce, compared to 40% in the West. The gap will close as content and ads move closer to transactions.

General search engines are not central to the customer journey in China: Baidu fell below 10% of online advertising last year, compared to Google’s c.55% share in the UK.

The Chinese model now has a vector to the rest of the world in the form of TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance added more retail GMV in China than Alibaba last year. TikTok wants to grow video shopping in the West, targeting a huge $470 billion in transactions by 2027.

Meta suffered its first year-on-year revenue decline in Q2, as long-standing challenges crystalise and an economic slowdown in the US dents display ad spend. 

In response, Meta is retooling its products to neutralise threats from post-social competitors like TikTok, and trying to minimise the impact of data restrictions. 

The long-term pivot to the metaverse is Zuckerberg's next big bet, but funding it depends on core business strength. 

YouTube’s tepid quarter signals a two-track online ad economy with advertisers protecting search spend as an essential cost of sales while cutting online display.

YouTube faces a challenge to strengthen its brand and direct response ad products while sacrificing some income to Shorts, its answer to competition from TikTok, which we estimate added three times as much ad revenue as YouTube in H1.

Beyond the short term, brands need to generate new demand, and that cannot be accomplished at the bottom of the funnel.

As private sector employers faced an unprecedented degree of uncertainty, the volume of vacancies fell 60% from 2019 to 2020, driven by the arts & entertainment, food & hospitality and retail sectors, leading expenditure on recruitment advertising to fall by 32%.

In 2021, vacancies for temporary placements are surging as society proceeds to unlock, with the near-term labour market tight, boosting expenditure on recruitment. Our concern is the masked unemployment in B2C sectors that will emerge should furlough end on 30 September. 

Judging by global revenue trends in FY2020, professionally-oriented networking platform LinkedIn gained from demand for hiring served by paid-for listings, also filling demand for events. Indeed, which serves the high-volume but lower-value end of labour markets, with a less fruitful budget and cost-per-click model, suffered mild revenue decline.

Employment reached an all time high in 2019 of 32.8 million people at work despite slower GDP growth in 2017-19. The tighter labour market has helped real wage growth. A two-tier jobs market has emerged, with high-grade skilled roles evolving in a wide range of service sectors, and a large pool of low-grade, part-time work  

The heterogeneous labour market has ensured that in recruitment classifieds, unlike property and auto, no digital player has achieved absolute dominance. In the layer devoted to the recruitment of professionals, served by LinkedIn, rising demand for more specialised roles has expanded the number of agencies, intensive users of digital tools to locate recruits and crack the problem of "approachability" of those already in the job  

Online job portals are rushing to improve their AI and programmatic capabilities as specialisation prompts a shift from keyword search to smart matching, leading to a boom in recruitment tech M&A. Traditional agencies such as Hays are upgrading their own data capabilities through acquisitions and partnerships with LinkedIn, Google, Salesforce and other data/tech providers