A Wall Street Journal article published on March 19, 2021, struck me on how the coronavirus propelled the monopoly or triopoly by Google, Facebook and Amazon in the digital marketing world.
The article indicates that although they were dominating players in marketing, the three tech giants attracted more marketing budget as a result of the pandemic, because the traditional marketing spending on, e.g., TV commercials during sports games, newspapers and billboards, all shrank directly and indirectly because of the pandemic.
I read the article not too long after watching the documentary "The Social Dilemma". Using the newly gained understanding, I can safely infer that with the additional budget flooding into the tech giants, more ads will be put on their platforms, they will collect more data on customers' behavior upon receiving the ads and subsequently, their algorithms will be further calibrated to be more accurate and invasive, and digital advertising will become more effective to advertisers. We just accelerated the downward spiral. This is a huge red flag to me because the pandemic accidentally accelerated the journey to monopoly for these giants. Traditional marketing media will have a hard time recovering from the impact if they do not run out of business.
Struggling retailers would double down on digital advertising in order to keep afloat with slammed customer demand as a result of COVID-19, further speeding up the monopoly. Further, the monopoly power also disadvantage advertisers because these tech giants may collude to charge a higher price.
It is really time to act for regulators and governments to pay attention to the rising monopoly power of these tech giants to protect the consumers, the advertisers and the overall society.
Source: Wall Street Journal, "How Covid-19 Supercharged the Advertising 'Triopoly' of Google, Facebook and Amazon", March 2021
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