Curated Guide to Research
MediaPost's comprehensive guide to current research in the marketplace.
- 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.
- U.S. ad and marketing spending will fall 7.1% this year to $494.23 billion, according to a new forecast released today by media industry economists PQ Media. That's a steeper rate of decline than the 6.8% decline global advertising and marketing spending is projected to sustain, although most of the world's markets have experienced a significant impact from the global COVID-19 pandemic.
- In a disequilibrium that likely has not existed in the TV ad marketplace since the early days of cable and syndicated TV, a group of industry execs met Friday to discuss the growing value of the connected TV marketplace and concluded that it is dramatically undervalued in terms of advertising market share.
- As we head into the first of America's big holiday and shopping season events, it may be comforting to know that most of us haven't been losing much sleep during the pandemic. But maybe we should be.
- In a new Xandr survey, U.S. video advertising decision-makers also estimated that one in three ads aren't relevant to the consumers reached.
- Websites can be built and managed by in-house engineering teams with open-source tools or third-party tools. How are you managing your website? Here are some tips.
- The "real time" or close-to-real-time results provide the cornerstones to adjusting any marketing dimensions to more rapidly support optimizing ROI and/or brand equity.
- Cord-cutting in the U.S. slowed in Q3 for traditional and virtual pay TV providers to a 4.6% decline and 89.6 million subscribers. But steeper declines could resume in future periods.
- How are businesses faring during COVID-19? Smaller firms with less than 500 employees in retail, home, professional and personal services and automation continue to struggle.
- Data silos are increasingly frustrating consumers. Some 87% in a survey by the CMO Council found it frustrating when engaging in multiple channels and having to repeat themselves each time.
- 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.
- "Don't use small data to answer a Big Data question," said data scientist Zach Baze, chief intelligence officer at agencies Leo Burnett and Hawkeye.
- Researcher Parks Associates also reports that 78% of U.S. broadband households subscribe to at least one OTT service, up from 71% the previous year.
- Disney+ will add 112 million subscribers (+58%) worldwide, while No. 1 Netflix will add 73 million (+36%), to reach 274,000, projects Digital TV Research.
- Mediaocean is automating local TV media-planning and media-buying tools, improving workflow to better compete with digital and other media platforms. New automated features for pre- and post-buy media tasks will help local TV media buyers using its Spectra or Prisma systems. For pre-buy work, media buyers have had to manually aggregate avails for years -- as well as input negotiated rates with TV stations, forecasting, and optimizing schedules.
- Digital use has risen due to the COVID-19 crisis, and consumers like email because it is convenient and reliable, the CMO Council reports.
- Theatrical ticket data showed gamers comprised 25% of the audience. Historically gamers have proven to be more likely than the general online population to purchase media and entertainment products. Given this, Sony Pictures Entertainment set out to reach this lucrative segment on Twitch; the gamers go to social channel. This was no easy task, since gamers are a tight knit group filled with habitual ad blockers, typically impervious to traditional advertising.
- Nearly 50% of all programmatic OTT and CTV advertising goes to Roku devices, dwarfing other device makers, according to a Q3 2020 survey from ad-tech company Pixalate.
- 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.
- New research from Comcast Cable's ad sales division, Effectv, and VAB finds that linear TV can lift performance in all brand life stages, and is particularly effective for relatively young D2C brands.
- Critics say the immigration policies make it more difficult for skilled workers to acquire visas and require companies that hire "high-skilled" foreign workers with H-1B visas to pay them close to an average industry salary.
- A majority of people (52%) feel "tense" or "distressed" as a result of pandemic-induced pressures.
- Eye-tracking TV tech company TVision has added person-level measurement data now being used by ad-tech and media-measurement companies Xandr, Oracle Moat, VideoAmp and iSpot.
- The validity of research came into question again following the 2020 presidential election. How could research companies not predict a tighter outcome between President Elect Joe Biden and President Trump?
- The big loser of the 2020 election was political polling -- and by extension -- survey-based consumer research. While caveats abound, it largely failed, raising questions about how good polling is not just for political campaigns, but for any form of marketing.
- Marketers don't fully understand technology's role in driving business and media goals, and few have learned enough since the onset of COVID-19, two studies suggest.
- 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.
