Zenith has lowered its global ad-spending forecast for 2017 and 2018, reducing their growth prediction from 4.2 percent to a flat 4 percent.
“Advertising expenditure grew ahead of the wider economy for the third consecutive year in 2016, but we expect it to fall behind over the next three years,” Zenith stated.
GroupM has also released a more conservative estimate, dropping their expected growth from 4.4 percent to just 3 percent.
User engagement with Instagram videos is growing faster than with photos, according data from NewsWhip, increasing 53 percent from 2016, as compared to 46 percent for photos.
This year saw a flattening of growth for mobile video consumption, per the Global Video Index. Additionally, long-form (20 minutes or more) video content now represents the most-consumed segment across all platforms, with mobile devices leading the trend.
“Much of that is due to the increasing amount of premium content that services are now making available to all devices,” the report notes, adding: “As longer content becomes more prevalent, an increasing number of users—across all demographics—are as comfortable watching longer form content on smaller screens as they are watching it on big screens. And they’re simply watching more content in general.”
Biometric technology will be fully integrated into the smartphone market in the near future, according to research by Acuity Market Intelligence. Their data reveals that by 2019, 100 percent of smartphones, 96 percent of wearables and 83 percent of tablets will integrate biometrics in some way. Acuity also predicts that all three categories will reach full saturation by 2020.
Consumers are not yet ready to rely on fingerprinting or facial recognition to replace current payment options. A survey by Paysafe found that 40 percent of consumers think biometric solutions are unsafe in their current state. This is not a death blow to payment innovation, however: 54 percent responded that they will not need to carry cash by 2020 and 57 percent reported that they use mobile wallets “much more” than they did two years ago.
Research by Forrester indicates that half of all online shopping goes through marketplaces like Amazon, Alibaba and eBay. Forrester further predicts this figure to rise to two-thirds in the next five years.
Millennials value sales associates much more than baby boomers, a study by ChargeItSpot found. Of the 600 shoppers surveyed, 66 percent of millennials found interaction with employees “extremely important,” while 22 percent of baby boomers claimed it was “extremely unimportant.”
PwC has released a new report on digital advertising toward children, forecasting the market to grow to $1.2 billion by 2019, accounting for 28 percent of all kid-directed advertising. The report attributes the rapid growth to shrinking TV watching among young children.
“Today kids are spending time on apps, games, online video, [streaming video on demand],” Dylan Collins, SuperAwesome’s CEO, told The Drum. “Virtually any free content producer (e.g., most game developers) survives by including ads in their games.”
Research by New Yes Lifestyle Marketing indicates that consumers are 50 percent more likely to open emails with a personalized subject line than one without. The report defined personalization as subject lines including the recipient’s name or a previously purchased or browsed item, and went on to state that only 2 percent of marketing emails include such personalization. Their report also concluded that subject lines shorter than 20 characters drive a 31 percent higher-than-average open rate.
Public relations firm MWW released a report on “corpsumers,” which it defined as consumers that value a company’s values, actions and reputations as much as its products. These brand activists make up 33 percent of the adult American population, and are more likely to be well-educated, high-income millennials or Gen Z. Of the corpsumers MWW identified, 89 percent claimed that they would share positive news about companies, and 79 percent reported they would share negative news.
The GSMA has released revenue projections for the IoT, and they are astronomical. According to their report, global earnings for the IoT will reach $1.8 trillion by 2026. Of that number, $534 billion is projected to come from the Americas region. Their research also predicts that mobile IoT networks will reach 862 million connections by 2022.
Podcast industry revenues will hit $220 million this year, according to PwC research, an 85 percent growth from last year. Income last year was a relatively modest $119 million.
Millennials are moving away from live TV, according to a study by the Consumer Technology Association, 55 percent of respondents reported a preference for self-recorded and on-demand TV, compared to 45 percent who enjoyed live broadcasts. This number drops off dramatically for those outside the age bracket, with only 35 percent of those 35-years-and-over preferring time-shifted content.
eMarketer has revised its predictions for the growth of cord-cutters in 2017, increasing the number from 15.4 million to 22.2 million. Additionally, it estimates that the amount of people who have never had a cable subscription will grow by 5.8 percent to 34.4 million.
As a result, eMarketer has lowered its estimate for US TV ad spending by more than $1 billion, from $72.72 to $71.65 billion for the 2017 fiscal year.
According to a new report by Deloitte, a full 80 percent of shoppers have researched grocery products online, accounting for 51 percent of all grocery purchases last year. Additionally, almost 30 percent of survey respondents claimed to trying products based on online recommendations and reviews.
Marketing technology accounts for 16 percent of marketing budgets this year, per market analysis by WARC. The market currently is currently worth $34.3 billion annually.
A new report by MMGY Global revealed that road trip-style vacations have increased by 77 percent from last year, and have jumped from 22 percent of all domestic travel in 2016 to 39 percent in 2017. Furthermore, expenditures during road trip travel have increased in the past year from $66 billion to $113 billion.
Jobs requiring social skills have been the least affected by automation, as found by a study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social skills grew by 11.8 percent, while fields requiring high math and low social skills shrank by 3.3 percent over the same period.
Word-of-mouth influence is much more common among millennial men, a study by Engagement Labs found. Members of the demographic group have, on average, 12 brand-related conversations per day, as compared to 6 for men ages 40–69 and 10 for millennial women. The study also found that millennial men were 26 percent more likely to talk about ads they’d seen than millennial women.
The gulf between mobile and desktop searches is widening, according to a report by BrightEdge Research. Mobile devices and tablets accounted for 57 percent of all Google searches in 2017. The study also revealed that users’ search goals differ greatly across platforms: 79 percent of search queries ranked differently between mobile and desktop.
The National Retail Federation has lowered its sales forecast for the year, dropping their growth projection from 3.7–4.2 to 3.2–3.8 percent. The prediction applies only to retail stores, excluding car, gas station and restaurant sales from the figure.
MediaRadar has released a new report on digital video ads, revealing that 60 percent of sites autoplay the majority of their video ads, despite recent efforts by Google to punish sites that use the tactic.
Reports by Journalist’s Resource that streaming services don’t actually combat piracy: college students that stream music are 11.4 percent more likely to illegally download music. The largest factors impacting the results are beliefs that the practice is not risky and that it does not harm the original artist. Demographic factors such as gender, income and college major had no significance on piracy rates.
