For all the ad industry's talk of Big Data and martech, marketing professionals consider themselves the least data-driven of the major corporate departments, according to a just-released report from data management firm Talend. Asked to estimate the percentage of their decisions that were based on data, marketing pros appear to be far more reliant on their own gut. Nearly half (48%) of marketing pros said 50% of less of their decisions were based on data, which compares with 44% for financial, 35% of production, 33% of engineering and only 23% of IT professionals.

Prior to the 2020-21 TV season, I released an annual report examining the impact of pre-season buzz on new TV shows. Each time my conclusion has been the same: despite some notable exceptions, there is no correlation between the level of pre-season buzz a show receives and whether it becomes successful once it premieres. In this week's edition, I provide a post-pandemic update, but here's a little background: Until the early-2000s, the broadcast networks almost exclusively aired repeats during the summer and there was virtually no television-based news other than previewing new fall series - which would typically begin right …

Asked whom they would prefer to share their personal data with in order to improve their consumer purchasing experience, a slight majority of Americans said their preference would be to share it with brands they trust. That's one of the findings of a new report from customer data platform BlueVenn, which conducted parallel surveys of panels of U.S. consumer sand brand marketers in February and also found a profound disconnect between consumers and brands in terms of the value of the media they use to interact.

Podcasts are poised for a surge in ad spending, according to a study of "advertiser confidence" based on various mobile ad formats, fielded by Advertiser Perceptions in December 2020. The study, which surveyed 252 mobile advertisers and agency media buyers, found podcasts have a net positive index of 56 (the difference between those executives indicating they plan to increase vs. decrease their podcast ad budgets over the next six months).

A Standard Media Index analysis of national TV ad spending by type of media buy -- upfront, scatter and direct-response -- reveals a pattern of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic-related ad recession of 2020. While the national TV ad market collapsed in Q2 like many other media options -- especially non-digital "linear" ones -- it has begun to rebound in the Q1 of this year -- especially for upfront.

In this week's edition I offer some wide-ranging thoughts to set the stage for this year's marketplace.

Millennials are often characterized as digital-first media consumers by Madison Avenue, but the just-released Spring 2021 edition of Harvard's annual Youth Poll finds that when it comes to accessing news, local TV newscasts have the greatest reach. A third (33%) of the 18- to 29-year-olds responding to the survey, fielded in March, said they get their news or current events content from local TV stations, putting the linear TV medium ahead of Facebook (30%) and all other digital and/or analog media platforms.

Persons with visual, hearing, speech and/or cognitive disabilities are active consumers of media, but they also have special needs, frequently utilize assistive tools to compensate, and often have a difficult time with some of the most mainstream media, especially social media.

In a healthy leading indicator of the U.S. ad industry recovery, ad execs -- both advertisers and media planners and buyers -- say they are reviewing their ad budgets much less frequently than even five months ago. The data, which comes from the IAB just-released update of an ongoing tracking report of ad executive confidence, shows that only 15% of respondents are reviewing their ad budgets monthly vs. nearly double (29%) that amount when it last surveyed them in November 2020.

The share of desktop video ad impressions deemed risky soared 22% during the second half of 2020, according to the latest edition of Integral Ad Science's (IAS) "Media Quality Report."