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."

Only 2% of media agency executives expect their connected TV (CTV) ad budgets to decline this year, while 86% say they will increase, 19% saying it will be "dramatic." Those are among the findings of a survey of 177 U.S. media agency execs conducted by Pixability in February.

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.