Gen Z among consumers most likely to keep buying during the economic downturn: Datacenter Weekly

Disney’s data deal with Kroger and PepsiCo

“Disney Advertising has launched a beta test with Kroger Precision Marketing and PepsiCo that will let packaged-goods marketers use shopper data to reach target audiences across select Disney inventory, starting with Hulu,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports.

The timing: “After starting with a handful of beta advertisers, the program is expected to roll out broadly for CPG marketers in the second half of this year,” Neff adds.

Essential context: “The move comes as packaged-goods marketers are turning to connected TV and retail media to reach audiences that are increasingly hard to find on linear TV and target in digital,” Neff notes. “The impending loss of cookies on Google’s Chrome browser and privacy barriers erected by Apple and others have made retail data such as Kroger’s increasingly valuable.”

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The consumers most likely to keep buying during the downturn

Performance marketing company Wunderkind gave Datacenter Weekly an exclusive first look at its new study titled “The Industry Pulse: Consumer Spending During Economic Uncertainty,” based on a survey of 500 consumers in the U.S. (An additional 500 consumers were surveyed in the U.K., but we’re focusing on the U.S. portion of the study.) Some key findings:

• Across demographics, “52% of U.S. consumers are cutting back on non-essentials, with 37% cutting back on essentials too,” per Wunderkind’s report.

• But Gen Z intends to keep spending: “In the U.S., the younger generation isn’t phased by the economic downturn as they registered the highest levels of consumer confidence, with only 22% stating a need to reduce discretionary spending.”

• “The percentage of high-income U.S. consumers passing on luxury items is a mere 13%. The majority (63%) of this demographic say they have no need to cut back at all,” Wunderkind’s survey found.

Google’s optimistic take on post-cookie targeting

“Google released new data about what the post-cookie future may look like in advertising, revealing a small dip in performance,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports.

The details: Google’s study is meant to show “how ads perform within its ecosystem when they don’t use cookies for ad targeting,” Sloane explains. “Instead of cookies, Google has been developing what it calls the Privacy Sandbox, which is a set of tools that tap into more anonymous, aggregated internet data to target the ads. In this early limited test, Google claimed that the ads performed almost on par with ads that used cookies.”

Essential context: “Google still intends to remove third-party cookies from Chrome at the end of 2024, ditching the online tracking tools in a bid to catch up to privacy measures pushed by other platforms, such as Apple,” Sloane adds.

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Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.