Americans aged 18-24 watched a weekly average of a little less than 22 hours of traditional TV during Q1 2014. That was a 95-minute drop-off from Q1 2013, which in turn had been down by 80 minutes from the year before. In the space of 3 years, Q1 TV viewing by 18-24-year-olds dropped by a little more than 4-and-a-half hours per week.

Americans are increasingly embracing original digital video programming, preferring that type of content to news, sports and daytime programming on television, and like it almost as much as they do primetime TV. The research reveals that 22% of American adults watch original digital video each month, bringing the audience to 52 million per month. This represents a 15% increase from 45 million per month, reported in 2013.

According to The State of Marketing Automation 2014 report, Marketing Automation systems which were used primarily for email automation have now become sophisticated platforms capable of transforming organizations' revenue generating capacity.

According to the CFI Group's Retail Satisfaction Barometer, the use of mobile applications for shopping purposes doubled in the past year, with 41% of consumers actively using mobile apps to hunt for information while shopping. Mobile provides an additional channel for shoppers looking for the most convenient avenue to purchase relative to their lifestyle.

The study found that personalized abandoned cart emails that show the actual customer cart had 25% higher transaction rates than abandoned cart emails that just linked back to the brand's Website. And, personalized subject lines had 12% higher unique open rates than mailings without personalization.

Renewed consumer spending is in line with pre-recession trends and consumer optimism is higher than it's been in years. The outlook for 2014 continues the positive trend with spending expected to increase further by 3.6%, more than three times the projected rate of inflation for the year.

The majority of digital marketers say that digital advertising hasn't lived up to its promise and feel that branding ads bought via programmatic methods raises concerns. They are searching for the best way to connect with consumers on an emotional level.

According to the study report, since the proliferation of digital and social media, including mobile, has made information more readily accessible to prospective consumers, consumers report an increase in usage across all sources of information in the past five years, including sources such as brand websites, user reviews, and third party expert content, when learning more about new products and services.

Marketers tend to focus a lot of energy on Millennials, but the report asks, "... so how many millennials are there in the US, anyway?"

According to the sixth wave of LMX Family, The Ipsos MediaCT annual study of attitudes and behaviors of families with kids aged 0-12 years old, media and technology are a ubiquitous part of life today for families with young children. The emergence of new technologies and new media platforms provide new dimensions to traditional family dynamics shaping the consumers of tomorrow.