It may seem counterintuitive that in a year when many consumers were stuck at home due to a global pandemic, mobile device traffic grew while desktop and tablet usage declined, but that's the result of a year-over-year analysis of traffic to more than 900 global brands representing more than 20 billion individual user sessions, compiled by Contentsquare.

For all the hype surrounding the efficacy of influencer marketing, the majority of active social media users in the U.S. say they will never buy a product or service promoted by social media influencers. That's one of the noteworthy conclusions of a survey fielded by Visual Objects in March among U.S. active social media users.

It's no surprise by now that 2020 was a banner year for digital ad spending, and that it grew its share considerably as many legacy advertisers were forced to accelerate "digital transformation" that they may have been slow-walking prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. What may be surprising, however, is that digital's increasing share of ad spending is being concentrated in fewer digital hands.

The killer app for interactive ads appears to be that they simply stand out, are good at generating attention, and make people curious enough to move on to the next stage and actually interact with them. That is the finding of a national survey conducted by IPG Mediabrands Magna and Media Lab units, along with Verizon Media.

While trust in most institutions has fallen following a year of the pandemic, economic crises and political turmoil, trust in media has fallen to all-time lows since PR giant Edelman began tracking it in 2012. The overall media industry currently has a "trust index" of 51, according to the just-released Edelman Trust Barometer 2021, ranking it last behind Business (61), NGOs (57) and Government (53) among major societal institutions.

Television series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) are based on characters appearing in Marvel comics who have a shared reality with the theatrical film franchises. From 2013-2020, a dozen shows were produced by Marvel Television, with ABC Studios and ABC Signature Studios, across broadcast, cable, and streaming (ABC, Netflix, Hulu, and Freeform). A couple of series set in the X-Men universe, which were not officially part of the MCU, were produced by 20th Century Fox (for Fox and FX). In this week's edition, I review -- and rate -- all of them. Nuff said!