Anyone in advertising and marketing who hasn't been asleep for the past decade has to know what a LUMAscape is -- the cleverly delineated flowcharts mapping, and categorizing the players in key digital media "ecosystems" -- created by the team at Luma Partners. They have inspired countless others to do the same within their areas of media expertise, and now, courtesy of Magellan AI, there's a "Podscape" doing the same to organize the burgeoning marketplace of podcasting.

GroupM dramatically improved the outlook for the U.S. ad economy in 2020, and revised its 2021 outlook from negative to a positive gain in its just-released year-end forecast. GroupM now projects the U.S. ad economy will contract only 3.9% -- about half the 7.6% decline it projected when it published its mid-year outlook in June. For 2021, the U.S. ad economy is now projected to expand 6.2% vs. a previously forecasted decline of 1.7%.

U.S. and worldwide marketing spending are now forecast to fall 7.1% and 6.8%, respectively, this year, bringing 2020's marketing economy to pre-2018 levels, according to new forecast estimates released today by media economists PQ Media. PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn cited the global COVID-19 pandemic as the reason for the 2020 marketing recession and projects 2021 will rebound, expanding 5.9% worldwide.

While the return on ad spending has changed dramatically for many categories in recent years -- especially during the recent pandemic -- the returns for media and publishing marketers has proven remarkably stable, according to an analysis released today by GroupM Business Intelligence.

In an effort to delineate how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumer mindsets -- and how that might impact how they behave as consumers -- GroupM created a nifty "impact map" clustering people into four quadrants based on their levels of anxiety, security and proactiveness. The representation, part of GroupM's just-published "Covid-19: A Game Changer For Media And Purchasing" report, is drawn from the agency's live consumer panel and compresses a lot of data into a simple visual device.

Apple's planned changes for IDFA (identifier for advertisers) in its next iOS version has potentially grave consequences for the mobile advertising industry, according to a survey of Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) members conducted by the MMA and AppsFlyer. The study, which surveyed members in September, found the new opt-in requirement will negatively impact the ability of many marketers to properly identify users and attribute their advertising impact, which will likely shift or reduce mobile advertising budgets.

More issues with TV audience measurement, network promotional follies, why ratings don't matter anymore and how shows are dealing COVID-19 and police brutality are among the things I've been pondering during the pandemic. Want to hear more?

If the membership of the Association of National Advertisers is representative, the U.S. ad industry has made little progress on ethnic diversity over the past three years, but it has made some strides in terms of gender diversity at the top of the marketing ranks. Those are the top line findings from the ANA's just-released 2020 "Diversity Report," which shows that the percentage of Caucasians leading or working in the ANA member companies has remained essentially unchanged, despite a year of ethnic social inequity protests and vows from the ad industry to change that.

While a variety of consumer research studies in recent months have sought to segment consumers based on how they have changed behaviorally and/or psychographically in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, a new one released by Burke Inc. and Seed Strategy could well be called Covidgraphics. In their new report, "The Refracting Nature of COVID-19," they identify eight newly surfaced market segments created by the pandemic's impact on health, home and work lives nationwide.

The ad industry routinely uses terms like "lift" and "ROI" (return on investment) to benchmark and measure the results of advertising, marketing and media buys, but those terms can be subjective, vary greatly among ad execs and especially from the deluge of suppliers offering to track and report them. This morning, the Advertising Research Foundation, is releasing a new guide that at least tries to organize the last issue: the ROI supply chain.