WPP was the winningest of Madison Avenue's major holding companies during Q1 both in terms of total new account wins and gross billings, according to the latest edition of R3 Worldwide's agency new business report.

"Advertising investment is set to fall 8.1% - $49.6 billion - worldwide this year," WARC Head of Data Content James McDonald writes in "The Impact of COVID-19 On Ad Investment," noting, "This compares to a pre-outbreak forecast of +7.1%, equating to an absolute downgrade of $96.4 billion.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published some valuable research -- including a series of ongoing tracking studies of the buy-side and the sell-side -- during the COVID-19 pandemic, but a new report released today is a selective amalgam of third-party research suppliers that appears intended to cast a positive light on digital media, per se.

'What goes up must come down' may be a core principle of physics, but it also apparently applies to digital media during a pandemic. While digital ad spending has increased 16% year-over-year, according to the IAB's and PwC's just-released "Internet Advertising Revenue Report," average CPMs have actually declined a corresponding 16%, according to a separate report on "COVID's Impact On Pricing," also released today by the IAB.

It's the newest form of product placement, but the fastest-growing one, and given the shifts in viewing taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic, streaming TV services are likely to expand their share of the overall product placement business. Those are some of the top line findings from PQ Media's just-released annual Global Product Placement Forecast.

The data, which comes from the latest edition of NPD's Mobile Data Consumption Report, also shows March saw month-over-month smartphone data consumption jump 27%.

Despite the disruption of many major televised sports events due to the COVID-19 pandemic -- or maybe because of it -- the number of Americans watching live sports via digitally distributed video platforms such as OTT, vMVPDs, etc., is projected to jump 72.3% this year to 36.5 million, according to new estimates from eMarketer.

Much like the stock market (see SPX [S&P 500]), the year-to-date performance of the major publicly-traded digital advertising companies has been a roller coaster, though the biggest players appear to be outpacing results of the internet overall (see internet index), according to an analysis by UBS' equity research team.

The U.S. national TV advertising marketplace will decline 15% in 2020 due to the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the displacement of billions of dollars in TV sports advertising dollars. That's the net analysis of a new report from the equity research team at UBS. The report, "Slow Recovery Expected For TV Advertising," shows 2020 will be the rockiest period in what has already been a rocky phase for U.S. TV advertising leading up to this year's crisis.

The outlook for the 2020-21 network TV upfront advertising marketplace is mixed, according to a survey of a representative sample of advertising executives conducted in late March by the equity research team at UBS.