The $1 Trillion Ad Opportunity

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst David Meier and host Dylan Lewis discuss:

• The global ad market eclipsing $1 trillion in 2024, what's driving the spend, and lesser-known stocks to watch in the industry.
• Reddit's new "Reddit Answers" tool, the company's latest foray into AI, and how the online community continues to lead publishers in AI efforts.
• How the market continues to give investors a discount on small-caps stocks, and why one ETF might be better than another for exposure.

Then Motley Fool analyst Asit Sharma joins host Mary Long for a look at LVMH's Bernard Arnault and what he has in common with Warren Buffett.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

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This video was recorded on Dec. 09, 2024.

Dylan Lewis: The advertising market hits 12 zeros. Motley Fool Money starts now. I'm Dylan Lewis, and I'm joined over airwaves by Motley Fool analyst David Meier. David, thanks for joining me.

David Meier: Thanks for having me.

Dylan Lewis: Today, we're going to be checking in on the ad market. We're going to be looking at a corner of the stock market that you've been paying attention to and also looking at Reddit's' AI ambitions. Let's start with the ad market. The year is not quite over yet, but it is looking like a milestone year for advertising. ad spend worldwide expected to pass 1 trillion in 2024, according to media investment organization GroupM. David, I feel like this time of year, a number like that isn't all that surprising given all of the holiday ads we're seeing, [laughs] but it is still a massive number.

David Meier: It's enormous. I can literally remember years ago, when I was first starting to follow this trend, it was huge when it crossed 500 billion and here we are with three more zeros. [laughs]

Dylan Lewis: One of the amazing things is GroupM, they are an organization that follows these things. They're looking at media investment. They'd originally predicted this would happen in 2026, revised it to 2025, and then revised it to 2024. [laughs] They have seen an acceleration on that spend. I have to imagine that that means that advertisers are seeing a return on their spend.

David Meier: Always, because that is literally the only reason that you do advertise. You wouldn't keep doing something if you were just going to keep losing money at it. So, yes, especially as you continue to move from analog, which are still out there, analog ads to digital ads, it's much easier to measure the ROIs. You can see, you can make adjustments easily. Absolutely, the ROI is still there.

Dylan Lewis: One of the curious elements of this; we're basing some of the conversation here on a Wall Street Journal piece that was out this morning. They noted that some of the gains that we are seeing in advertising is coming from a reduction in consumer goods companies with their spend for more traditional in store retail. Apparently, I didn't know this. That is not characterized as advertising. [laughs] It is a totally different form of spend and budgeting. What do you make of that?

David Meier: It's not surprising. The reason it's not surprising is, again, because there are new ways that those same advertisers, the consumer package goods firms can see how effective their ads are. For example, Amazon, you can go onto their space, get your digital ad in front of consumers and see how well it works. Another example, Instacart. Now, this is relatively new for them, but think of their platform as a digital grocery store with digital shelf space. It's the same thing. It's just a matter of getting your product, your promotion, your pricing in front of a large growing and people who are willing to spend money on using the Instacart service to buy groceries, getting your ads in front of them in order to spur more spending.

I can see directly how it's working. I can see which areas of the country is working best. I can see which stores people are going to. I can see so much, and that's the big piece of it. It's the data and analytics that's driving all these decisions of where to go, where to spend, what to do more of, what to do less of.

Dylan Lewis: You mentioned this is a trend you've been following for a little while. Amazon came up Instacart, probably a little bit more of a surprise for some people that don't follow the business as closely. Beyond some of the usual suspects, I'll throw Meta and Alphabet in there too. What are some companies that you think maybe people should be having on their radar when it comes to increased ad spend?

David Meier: I would say, if you're a long time Fool listener, you probably have this company on your radar, but keep it on your radar, and that's The Trade Desk, because what The Trade Desk does as an aggregator of what are called demand side, like people coming to them and say, help me place ads in various places. It's almost a one to one correlation between the amount of spending that's being done and the amount of business that's available to the Trade Desk. The trend of upward and to the right in terms of global ad dollars being spent is the Trade Desk is almost the first beneficiary of that.

Dylan Lewis: It feels like, of the digital channels, they are all nascent in some way. But I think, connected TV, in particular, and ad supported video streaming in particular, are probably even earlier innings than some of the more traditional display sponsored result type stuff that we would see from a Google or from an Amazon.

David Meier: That's exactly right. There's actually the little company that I've been following for a couple of years that's playing directly into this called Integral Ad Science. What they do is they actually help digital advertisers on these various channels, streaming, connected TV, etc. They say, hey, we can verify that a person, not a bot, actually saw this. Again, the data becomes more valuable. The other thing that Integral Ad science does is they say, hey, your brand gives off this vibe, you don't want to place it against this content, it could be congruent to it or just downright inappropriate. Integral Ad science is another one that is seeing the benefits of this as again, more advertising moves digital.

Dylan Lewis: One of the companies that is hoping to earn more of that digital ad spend pie is Reddit. This is the online community and social media platform. Ads are a very large part of the business right now, and one of the ways that they are trying to, I think, boost that ad revenue, is by boosting the amount of time that people are spending on the platform and making the platform even more useful, even more user friendly. We have seen an announcement today that gets at that. They are bringing forward a new user facing AI application. They are calling Reddit answers. David, what are we looking at here?

David Meier: We are looking at a very good business idea for a number of reasons. One, right now, lots of other Generative AI media get there. You can search Reddit in many different places. But what Reddit doesn't have control of is what is being returned back. You might search for something, tie it to Reddit in the search that you're doing. But who knows if you're truly getting back what you're looking for. Then the earlier point that you made, you're not on Reddit's platform when you do that. We don't know what's going on. But it's still good, because those third party searches do bring engagement to the site.

But what this does is it says, you can stay on the site, search within the site, and do it in a conversational way as opposed to a keyword way. The brilliant thing is Reddit can take all the data that it has and that data is expanding each time somebody uses it and carefully train its model to make sure that it gives a good answer and the experience is good. If the experience is good, you'll stay on, which means more engagement for Reddit, which means potentially attracting more advertisers because that's what you're trying to do. They're not going to put any of their third party relationships at jeopardy by doing this, but they're going to try to say, we can do this. We have the technology, we have the data, let's make it a very useful thing for the redditors that come to the site all the time.

Dylan Lewis: From the press release it seems Reddit Answers will be rolling out to a small number of US users, and it's also only available in English at the moment. If you are a user, you may not see it right away, but I think one of the ways that may be helpful to think about it is fairly similar to what we are seeing with Google and their AI overviews when people are submitting queries, except Reddit is wholly owning that relationship. You brought it up. I When I talked with Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit a couple months ago, we talked about the amount of inbound traffic that Google and other search engines create for Reddit, this feels like they are trying to better possess some of that relationship that they have with their end user.

David Meier: Absolutely. The way to think about it, and this is something that I learned a long time ago and when I was getting my MBA from my strategy class. But basically, the customer experience is essentially what defines your brand. If you create good customer experiences, you tend to have a good brand. Your higher net promoter score, or you can think of it in many different ways. But the more that they can keep control of the early innings of AI, in terms of generative search, the better that they can control the experience, they can also learn faster from it, as well. Like, this didn't work, let's make a pivot or hey, this seems to be working. Let's lean more into this. Again, there's no doubt that Generative AI, AI search, all of that is going to continue to progress forward and now Reddit has essentially put their stake in the ground saying, hey, from this point forward, we're going to be in control of the experience through the awesome data that we have, and the data stack is growing, and we'll just continue to make the experience better and better and better and improve the Reddit brand.

Dylan Lewis: They've been doing quite a bit to invest in the platform, and AI has been front and center for a lot of that. I think one of the main things that they view as a way to expand their total addressable market is to translate the content on Reddit to more and more countries and localize that content. AI has been a very large part of that. I can't help but look at a company like Reddit and say, I feel like if you want to study digital media and publishing and how some of this next gen technology should be used, follow Reddit, because so many of the things that they seem to be doing here, David, I almost put them in the bucket of, like, table stakes 3-5 years from now. For a lot of these types of businesses.

David Meier: I completely agree. Early on in their life and then through the early stages of their IPO when they were getting ready to do it, there was a whole lot of worry. Isn't Reddit going to be disrupted by AI? This is going to hurt them. They have absolutely use Judo to take a weakness and turn it into a strength here. I would imagine there will also be plenty of Harvard business [laughs] case studies down the road of just on that topic alone. You saw a threat and you neutralized it and you turned it into a strength. That is the mark of a great management team, in my opinion.

Dylan Lewis: As we wrap up here, as we're heading toward the end of 2024, I like getting a finger on the pulse from our analysts on the corners of the market they're paying attention to and where they think some of the investing ideas for 2025 might be. You've been digging a little bit into small caps, David. What are you seeing right now?

David Meier: I've been on the small-cap bandwagon since 2023. You can go back to all my [laughs] content. I've done nothing but found on the small-cap drum since then. Despite the fact or even with the fact that they have had a very good 2024, as a group, I think the trend is going to is going to continue. I think the small-cap universe continues to be on a relative valuation basis, more attractive than the large-cap universe. Very simply, you just look at the forward word price to earnings ratios of the S&P 600, which is their small and mid-cap index relative to the S&P 500, it's 40% less. It doesn't necessarily guarantee that small-c caps are going to outperform or anything like that, but what it says to me, continues to say to me is that this is the pond you want to fish in.

This is where you want to look for opportunities. Because if you can find that high quality business, that the Motley Fool is known for unearthing, a good business, a good management team, a competitive advantage, growth opportunities ahead of it. You're probably going to pay a lower price, which should over the long term, turn into higher incremental returns. I still love the small-cap space, and I can't wait to continue to find new ideas in 2025.

Dylan Lewis: I like that you zoomed in on the valuation element of that because I think we can lose sight of it sometimes. You can have great returns because you find a business that is a quality business and continues to put up great results. You can also have great returns because the market revalues something at a higher multiple than they were willing to in the past. You can find great returns if you can do both because you have a compounding effect there.

David Meier: Actually, let me interrupt right there. There's actually three stages of returns. The three stages of returns are one, a business is not doing well and you get it when the market recognizes, this business isn't going to fail or anything like that. Then, yes, then the business starts doing well and the market recognizes that it's performance, that's Stage 2. Then stage three is multiple expansion. If you can find all three of those, and you tend to do that with smaller companies, that's where amazing returns can happen. I didn't mean you interrupt.

Dylan Lewis: No, that's perfect. I think with that preamble, I need to ask you about some specific companies that you're interested in. What are some small-caps that you think some of our listeners should have [inaudible]

David Meier: I'm sorry, we're out of time. [laughs] No, I'm just using it. I have a couple. One of them is named Fluence Energy. Fluence Energy is in the energy storage business. Essentially, they create utility scale battery systems, that they install alongside a renewable power producer. Let's say solar power. Obviously, the sun doesn't shine every day, so when the sun shines, you convert the sunlight to energy, you store the energy in the battery, and then from the battery, you release it to distribution, when it's necessary. They are doing extremely well. It's one of the fastest growing areas in the energy market.

They just had their most recent earnings call, and they said, we're expecting 40% revenue growth next year. They did about 25, 26 this year, so they're seeing an acceleration. The new CEO who came in earlier this year, he's transformed the company from basically cash burn to cash generation. There's all sorts of things that are great things that are happening from a fundamental business standpoint as well as what's happening in its marketplace, and you're trading at a reasonable valuation today. Fluence is like the perfect example of what you should be looking for with small-caps. A good business trading at a reasonable to attractive valuation and make your investment.

Dylan Lewis: For folks that maybe aren't interested in buying a specific company, but are rather interested in getting exposure to small caps through an index, you mentioned the S&P 600. Is that your preferred small-cap index?

David Meier: Yes, and the ticker symbol for one of the bigger ETFs by iShares is IJR. If you contrast that with the Russell 2000, which is essentially the 2000 small cap companies, what the S&P 600 does is it says, Hey, if you're not profitable, you're not in the index, whereas the Russell 2000 says, it's just based on size, so we don't care about anything associated with business fundamentals. In the S&P 600 ETF, you get more high quality companies. Yes, it is in my opinion, it is a slightly better vehicle to use. The reason is because, quite frankly, it fits more with what we try to do here at, The Motley Fool, investing in those fast growing high quality companies.

Dylan Lewis: David, love it. You brought the stock ideas. You brought the breakdown. Thanks for joining me today.

David Meier: Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.

Dylan Lewis: Thank listeners coming up on the show, Motley Fool Senior Analyst Asit Sharma joins my colleague Mary Long for a look at the leader of a luxury goods giant Bernard Arnault, and some of the parallels that he shares with Warren Buffett.

Mary Long: Asit, a couple of weeks ago, you and I were doing a segment on luxury stocks, and we ran out of time, but we had hoped to get to a question where we were going to compare LVMH CEO, Bernard Arnault to another famous, wealthy tycoon, Mr. Warren Buffett. We did not get the chance to get to that question then, but you told me that it was such a fun exercise to think about, so we figured you went to Europe. Now you're back. Let's sit down and compare these two folks. Before we get to comparing the two as investors, maybe let's set the table a little bit with their stories. Listeners are maybe vaguely familiar with Buffett's background once upon a time, buy shares in a New England textile mill, eventually gains a controlling stake in that textile mill, uses the cash that the company's generating to make investments in other businesses and in the stock market. Ultimately, that becomes the conglomerate that is Berkshire Hathaway, and the rest, as they say, is history. How about Arnault? How did he build the LVMH empire?

Asit Sharma: Mary, I think there's some similarities here to Warren Buffett in that Bernard Arnault was someone who had a head start in society. Let's say that. He had an engineering degree. His father owns a successful business, which he then went into and focused on real estate for a while. Then like Warren Buffett, after getting his feet wet in how the business world worked, he set his sights on a company that was having some trouble. This was a conglomerate by the name of [inaudible], and Wikipedia tells me that in 1984, he took control of this to get really access to a crown jewel by the name of Christian Dior.

This is reminiscent of what Warren Buffett did in his career. Now, you mentioned something very interesting that Warren Buffett through his limited partnership or alluded to, taking control of a struggling textile mill in New England by the name of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965. Yes, he actually was able to extract some cash out of that business, but it was a money losing business, a doomed business in some ways. Really, I think for Warren Buffett, the better analogy, not that yours isn't great, but maybe the one that history has shown is more apt is taking over a company that we now know today as GEICO. But this was just a pure insurance concern, and Buffett saw an opportunity to extract capital from that business, to use the float, that is the money that they take in as an insurance company before they pay out claims and invest that float in the same way that Bernard Arnault saw a chance to use a prestige brand within a struggling conglomerate and extract capital out of that. They both had this sense at a very young age. I think Bernard Arnault was in his 20s and Warren Buffett was in his mid 30s when they had a similar idea. Here's something that isn't working. I want to take control of that and really exploit it and use the capital for other things.

Mary Long: While both of these men have grown these companies, once struggling into more massive conglomerates that are certainly no longer struggling, they have very different reputations. So Buffett's got this friendly, folky grandpa vibe to him, and Arnault is nicknamed the Wolf in cashmere. Also, the terminator is another nickname that he's gotten. A part of Buffett's whole image is that he's known for his aphorisms, his nuggets of investing wisdom. Does Arnault have the same wise reputation, even though maybe his is a bit sharper than Buffett's?

Asit Sharma: Yeah, I don't know if the description of either out in the real world is that apt because Bernard Arnault has certainly had his very public fights with people who wanted to keep control of their own luxury brands, finally would take control along with his investment partners. That's why he has this reputation of being a wolf. Then, Warren Buffett has this, as you mentioned, aura of a very folksy, grandfatherly, like, guy. But Buffett is such a sharp negotiator, on one hand, and Arnault has proved to be a value creator for people who fought him tooth and nail. I mean, they did pretty well if they retained some interest after they sold most of their shares to him in various luxury brands.

Having said that, I think Buffett is more known for his aphorism, simply because every year we get these wonderful annual reports, and he's such a great communicator, whereas Arnault have to more scrape the barrel of things he said publicly, stuff that he's written intermittently. But I will share two quotes. I mean, here's one that he's most known for. I think it's great. Money is just a consequence. I always say to my team, don't worry too much about profitability. If you do your job well, the profitability will come. We've seen this wisdom, I think, distilled by other people in many different guys. It's not just about money, but the idea of doing something well and letting the results follow. I think is in theory, really easy to understand, but in your life, it's so hard to execute. We get distracted. We let our emotions get in the way. We want to focus on the result. I want the candy. When I interrupt that candy, it's going to be so great. You focus on the chore that your mom laid out. Do it well. Make your bed and make it neatly.

Just one more quote, Mary, I know you're itching to jump in here. Let me just throw this other one out that I think is fun, too. This is one that he relates about things he tells his team. I often say to my team, we should behave as if we're still a start-up. Don't go to the office too much. Stay on the ground with the customer or with the designers as they work. I visit stores every week. I always look for the store managers. I want to see them on the ground, not in their offices doing paperwork, which I think is just a wonderful management tool. It's like, focus on what's most important. You shouldn't be at your desk all the time, crunching numbers or making plans, get your feet on the ground, put your ear to the ground. But you wanted to interrupt?

Mary Long: No, that's great insight. While their personalities, like, obviously seem to affect their management styles, how do these two men differ when it comes to capital allocation? Are they running the businesses and using the money from Berkshire Hathaway, from LVMH in notably different ways? Are there any similarities there? What's that Venn diagram look like?

Asit Sharma: It's fascinating. Let's start with the similarities. I think both of these guys are decentralists. Neither one likes to micromanage things. Buffett is famous for after cutting those deals so shrewdly, having the agreements be very simple on paper, very short agreements, once or twice on a handshake, so you have to understand that Berkshire Hathaway does two things. If you don't know this already, they acquire operating companies, many of them publicly traded and run those companies. Then they also have an investment in publicly traded companies where they own the stock.

They're looking to buy great companies for a great price and then reap the investment gains from that. In the case where Berkshire Hathaway owns operating companies, it then folds under its own umbrella as one single publicly traded company, Buffett doesn't like to really dictate to the people who run the businesses within that umbrella how they should do their job. He likes to find great managers and let them do their things. I think Bernard Arnault is very similar in this regard in that he loves to acquire different brands. Whether it's Tiffany, for example, or just pick any number of the gazillion brands they have. Christian Dior I mentioned or Dom Perignon.

He loves to have these as stand-alone houses within his luxury empire, and he trusts that the people who are running these businesses can simultaneously keep the aura, the distinct aura those brands, keep the business acumen that they have on the ground, and adjust a little bit to the principles that LVMH has as a whole. I think that's how these two are both very similar in this sense. How they're different is, I think Arnault is just much more of a wheeler and dealer at heart. He actually revels in the fight and the glory. He loves to get into that mud slinging phase where he's dialing up his control. He's buying more shares of a company, now he's got a control percentage, and he's going to dictate how the deal will end. Buffett really hasn't shown that appetite. While they both have this amazing acumen for finding businesses, at the right price that they can then exploit. I think they're a little bit different in that regard.

If I can just add one more into this, I think Arnault might be more by choice of a strategic acquirer than Buffett is. Buffett is what I would say is he's a classic financial acquirer. He acquires a company and really is focused on the future cash flow. So price can play a great part of that. As I said before, he'll let the managers manage a business, and he chooses great people. Arnault has to be more of a strategic buyer. He has to say, how does this piece fit into our fashion empire? Can we lift and shift some of this brand to a different geography? He's developed more of a sense over the years of how to grow an asset based on its relationship to other parts and pieces. You look at Buffett's holdings within Berkshire Hathaway. They're vastly different. There are companies that don't have anything to do with the other. I mean, what does Dairy Queen have to do with GEICO? Not a lot.

Mary Long: We were talking before we started recording about the track records of these two different companies and how best to compare them, because if you zoom out and you look at, let's say, total returns over the past 10 years, over the past 20 years, Berkshire more closely tracks the market, whereas LVMH over those time horizons, trounces the market. But if you zoom way out to the beginning, that changes. It's Berkshire Hathaway that has a longer time horizon if you're lucky enough to have bought in early, you've just seen unfathomable returns on that initial investment. What is the best way to compare these two companies? What time horizon should we be looking at? Should we be looking at something totally different than total returns? What's the best way to say, all said and done, one is beating the other in one way or another?"

Asit Sharma: Well, Mary, I like the really simple insights you and I arrived at right before we take, which is to say that LVMH is a much smaller company than Berkshire Hathaway today. I think it's maybe less than one third the size. Berkshire Hathaway has crossed trillion dollars in market capitalization. As our friend Ricky Mulvey was reminding us, it has hundreds of billions of dollars on its balance sheet. Berkshire Hathaway is huge, and for it to keep returning the way it has returned in the past, it actually would need a bigger contribution from its operating companies than the stock it holds from the investments it's made in other companies.

That just becomes so difficult as you become a bigger entity. Whereas LVMH is relatively small. They have much of a ways to go still. There's still many boutique bespoke brands it can acquire in the real world and increase its operating cash flow and operating profile. I think maybe if we look out over the future the next 10-20 years, perhaps LVMH is the better bet. But let's go back to your point about duration. If you had the opportunity to invest in Berkshire Hathaway, before it went public or when it went public, you'd be sitting on a return that's in the hundreds of thousands of percent today. I don't think if you gave LVMH another 20, 30, 40 years, they could ever catch those returns. It's hard and unfair to compare these in some ways. But I would say if I had a way to calculate this, I would take Warren Buffett from the time he started delivering newspapers and track the money he made there, his part of that contribution to the capital he raised from friends and neighbors to start his limited partnerships, I would put that against the few thousand francs that Bernard Arnault probably tapped his dad for over a glass of Bordeaux wine one night and compare those numbers, I think that'd be very fascinating. If you track those two today. If you track those today.

Mary Long: Asit Sharma, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me so closely after your return from Europe. We're thrilled to have you back and for following up on this comparison between two very famous, very successful investors.

Asit Sharma: I appreciate it, Mary. This is a ton of fun.

Dylan Lewis: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool's editorial standards, it is not approved by advertisers. Motley Fool only picks products it personally recommend to friends like you. That's all for today's show. I'm Dylan Lewis. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Asit Sharma has positions in Amazon and Reddit. David Meier has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Dylan Lewis has positions in The Trade Desk. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Fluence Energy, Meta Platforms, The Trade Desk, and iShares Trust - iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF. The Motley Fool recommends Instacart and Integral Ad Science. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.