Curated Guide to Research
MediaPost's comprehensive guide to current research in the marketplace.
- Increasingly, there are ways for brand marketers to reach viewers on SVOD via so-called "brand integrations," formerly called product placements. And today Nielsen is releasing its first-ever "SVOD Brand Integrations Report" to Madison Avenue some perspective, as well as a baseline to plan with.
- The 900 TikTok accounts tracked for 12 months by Conviva amassed a combined 612.7 million and gained a "staggering" 604,000 new followers, on average.
- There are many ways to dimensionalize the size and scope of media companies -- annual sales, stock market capitalization, etc. -- but using its proprietary methods to assess the explicit value of their media assets, TradingPlatforms.com estimates Disney is worth more than $200 billion on that basis. That makes it the biggest media asset company in the world -- by a wide margin -- scaling five times larger than the second largest in TradingPlatforms analysis, Vivendi.
- Because of the pandemic, this is the first time in 30 years I haven't seen any fall pilots and have only seen a few mid-season shows prior to their premieres. So in this week's edition, I'm reviewing these new series after watching at least the first few episodes during their regular broadcast runs. Also due to the pandemic, many returning scripted shows didn't premiere until January or later. These include, ABC's The Rookie, Black-ish, Mixed-ish, NBC's Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D., Law & Order: SVU, New Amsterdam, Good Girls, FOX's Prodigal Son, The Resident, 9-1-1, 9-1-1: Lone Star, CW's Batwoman, All American, Riverdale, Nancy Drew, Legacies, Charmed, Black Lightning, The Flash. Still to come this spring include, NBC's Manifest, FOX's The Moodys, and CW's Legends of Tomorrow, In the Dark, and Dynasty.
- GM's impressive 69% retention of its customers is attributed to its popular SUV and pickup lineup.
- If you want to understand what institutions people truly trust, pose an existential threat. That, more or less, is what a year of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, and now that it is being brought under some semblance of control, some of those institutions are seeing their role as trusted information providers erode along with it -- especially media and brands.
- While some marketers say greater engagement as a result of less ad clutter is an important benefit of CTV, few seem willing to pay more for it.
- Nearly two-thirds of ad execs agreed with social media platforms' decisions to ban or restrict former President Donald Trump's account, and many are putting their money where their mouths are, according to new research from Advertiser Perceptions.
- Is Roku now poised to be the Comcast, Charter and DirecTV of the future?
- Procter & Gamble once again was the top TV advertiser in the U.S. during 2020, but it also was the most cost-efficient -- by a wide margin -- according to a Research Intelligencer analysis of data from Nielsen.
- Adelaide, an ad-tech firm marketing attention-based media ratings, has gotten the attention of the ad industry's researcher intelligencer, and has named six of them to a new strategic board of advisors. The board includes two former Advertising Research Foundation chiefs, as well as two of the ARF's Ephron Award winners.
- Mercedes-Benz is also the top brand for those earning over $150,000, while millennials and those earning $50,000 or less rank Toyota number one.
- As "ad choosers" -- those open to online advertising on their terms -- become more prevalent, Dentsu is partnering with Brave Software to understand how advertising impacts key branding metrics for its advertisers vs. other digital campaigns.
- One year and 19 in-depth consumer tracking studies later, Americans are feeling far more "hopeful" and less "worried," "scared" and "confused," but more "overwhelmed," "stressed," "sad," and "frustrated" by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Carat, which was tied with UM in the number-two spot, had been top-ranked for eight years running.
- Asked to rate various forms of surveillance marketing experiences as either "cool" or "creepy," consumers ranked ads being targeted to them from companies they don't know based on their location data to be the creepiest. Seventy-two percent of more than 5,000 adults from the U.S., U.K. Australia, France, Japan and Spain deemed such use of location data as creepy, according to one of the findings from Econsultancy's just-released "Digital Consumer Trends Index 2021."
- The AI Standards Working Group, co-chaired by IBM Watson Advertising and Nielsen, has released a guide on Ai and machine learning for execs, marketers, and technologists. Bias is one key topic the group will address based on feedback from industry participants.
- Backed by new consumer research showing seven in ten people feel the word "normal" creates a negative connotation, Unilever announced it will no longer use the word in its advertising, packaging and other forms of marketing communications.
- When it comes to advertising, American consumers are highly polarized in their behaviors, according to findings of a GWI (formerly Global Web Index) study conducted this month with WARC. Among the study's findings is a series of responses to advertising-related activities during the past seven days. And while slightly more than half (53%) of respondents said they skipped an online video ad without watching it, 40% said they completed an online video ad, too.
- With the digital ad industry poised to discuss and debate changing consumer sentiment about advertising, new research finds a plurality of Americans simply want ads to tell them about the products or services they are promoting.
- The traditional ad value exchange -- trading free, ad-supported content for consumer attention -- is no longer good enough, concludes a new IAB/PwC report being released today.
- Email teams have to deal with challenges of the online service gap, as half of consumers sometimes or always experience a problem online.
- European nations such as France, Sweden, Denmark, and Canada in North America are among the nations whose internet users have shown the greatest intent to search for and likely install and use ad-blocking software, according to an analysis of global data ranking and delineating per capita ad-blocking queries by nation. The U.S ranks 23 and Nigeria last among the 161 nations in the database.
- Across the EU5 countries, weekly SVOD usage rates average 68%, while AVOD averages 63%.
- AT&T had a net loss of about 3.26 million subscribers across its four pay-TV services, on top of a combined loss of nearly 4.1 million in 2019. Hulu + Live TV added 800 million, but vMVPDs' overall growth slowed.
- Media industry subscription revenues have far outpaced other forms of sales revenues over the past three years, according to the just-released March 2021 edition of subscription management platform Zuora's "Subscription Economy Index Report."
- A massive 81% of consumers want to form relationships with brands, while 70% still prefer discounts and free products.
- Citing "a renewed focus on measurement" in the wake of Google's decision to abandon "identifier" tracking and ad targeting, a major equities research firm has upgraded Nielsen shares from a "market perform" to "outperform," a Wall Street rating it hasn't had in more than two years.
- The most unhappy app environments are -- in this order -- social, utility, news and games (tied), according to a recent survey.
- Advertisers looking to reach consumers in environments where they fell happy vs. unhappy would do well to target them via mobile gaming and/or social media apps vs. those providing new and/or utilities. That's the conclusion of a recent survey conducted by AdColony. The "Consumer Sentiment Survey" also finds different ad formats produce more positive or negative sentiment.
