Curated Guide to Research
MediaPost's comprehensive guide to current research in the marketplace.
- A multitude of consumer research has already established that a majority of Americans support professional athletes, teams and leagues racial justice activism, and now there are Nielsen ratings to prove it. Well, sort of. A Nielsen Sports survey of American sports fans shows they overwhelmingly support racial injustice protests, as well as brands that support athletes, teams, leagues backing it.
- Only 30% of TV households that watched Major League Baseball on linear TV in 2019 tuned in to linear TV baseball this past weekend, Roku says. Results were drawn from automatic content recognition data from smart TV sets and other connected devices. Among the most hardcore baseball fans, Roku says, one-third watched zero minutes of linear TV baseball this year.
- During the first month of lockdown, people in 49 of 85 countries experienced slower mobile internet speeds and people in 44 countries experienced slower broadband speeds, a study released Tuesday finds. * Scandinavia is a subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties.
- When live sports events were suspended in late February due to concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, it contributed to a seesaw effect that drove traffic down to sports-related sites, but also contributed to a surge in traffic to online gaming and esports sites. That's one of the findings from Comscore's just released "State Of Gaming" report.
- American parents are facing a paradox when it comes to the amount of time their children spend on digital media screens. On the one hand, 71% of U.S. parents say they are concerned (31% "very) about the amount of time their children spend on screens. On the other hand, they are giving their kids access -- and even purchasing them their own smartphones -- at increasingly younger ages, according to findings of a comprehensive study conducted by the Pew Research Center and Ipsos.
- More than two-thirds of American parents say they are concerned about the things advertised to their children YouTube, according to findings of a new study analyzing parental concern about their children's "screen time," released this morning by the Pew Research Center. The concerns are most acute among Hispanic households, as well as households with children ages 5-11 vs. those with children under the age of five.
- The world's ad economy will decline more than 6%, while the U.S. ad market will slide nearly 4%, according to a revised consensus outlook of Madison Avenue's leading forecasters. The revised outlook incorporates Zenith Media's release this morning of its updated global and U.S. ad projections for 2020, revising its previous estimates set in December 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the advertising marketplace.
- After plummeting 31% in May, the U.S. ad market showed signs of stabilizing in June, declining only 17% in June vs. the same month in 2019, according to the latest data from the U.S. Ad Market Tracker, a collaboration of Standard Media Index (SMI) and MediaPost. Even so, it was the fourth consecutive monthly decline in U.S. ad demand, following March (-11%), April (-35%) and May (-31%).
- Dodge becomes first mass-market domestic brand to rank highest for both owner emotional attachment and initial quality in same year.
- Nielsen recently announced it is delaying plans to incorporate out-of-home viewing into its regular ratings reports, which had been scheduled to start with the upcoming fall TV season. There was an immediate backlash from the broadcast networks, and Nielsen quickly reversed itself. It is now going to include this data starting in September 2020 as originally planned. The real headline should not be "Backlash From Networks Causes Nielsen to Reverse Itself," but rather, "Paying For Phantom Viewers - Why Is There No Backlash From Advertisers?" Read this week's edition to find out why.
- Months into the COVID-19 pandemic a surprising media paradox has manifested, according to an analysis of 13 waves of surveys from Mindshare's "Pool" studies of American media consumers. Roughly half of Americans surveyed said they are explicitly limiting the amount of time they spend on media to avoid hearing news about the pandemic, while roughly the same percentage say they have also run out of things to watch, read or listen to on media.
- Among upcoming season relaunches and debuts, 64% of American fans say the NBA is their most highly anticipated sport to watch again.
- Only 15.2% of international marketers expect to return to regular office workdays following the COVID-19 pandemic, according to findings of a survey fielded last month by The Internationalist magazine. The vast majority (95.6%) said they plan to work more remotely in the future, and (69.5%) said their main offices would become periodic meeting places.
- More than a quarter (27%) of car shoppers said no auto brands stood out as having responded well to the COVID-19 crisis.
- Changes to how Apple handles the IDFA have brands talking. Every app publisher must now ask users to enable IDFA sharing via an ominous prompt that warns of tracking "across apps and websites owned by other companies" and offers the choice to either "Allow Tracking" or "Ask App Not to Track."
- The pandemic gods giveth, and they taketh away. That seems to be what has happened to TV viewing levels in recent weeks, according a UBS analysis of Nielsen trend data. Household and persons using TV levels spiked at the height of stay-at-home restrictions beginning in early March, but began stabilizing in May and are now trending below the pre-COVID-19 levels, raising questions for both TV and society-at-large.
- Political ad spending is proving to be a boom for broadcasters, taking an 80% share of campaign spending to date, according to an update released by Advertising Analytics. Republicans have concentrated their cable TV spending on one network -- Fox News -- which has taken nearly half (47%) of all Republican cable TV ad dollars to date.
- Connected TV consumers are widely on-board with accepting advertising to get more content without spending more money, and most are positive about their advertising experiences, finds an in-depth survey conducted for SpotX.
- Global research in 60 markets finds 60% of consumers don't expect to re-engage with the world for at least another month.
- A significant number of Americans who have heard about campaigns by brand marketers to boycott various media say they are aware it targeting Facebook and Instagram, according to findings of studies fielded by Horizon Media. The studies, which Horizon began conducting periodically at the end of June, when a grassroots #StopHateForProfit campaign was launched. To date, more than 400 major brand marketers have paused advertising on the social networks to put pressure on their lax control of people spreading hate and disinformation.
- Research, isights and analytics continue to be a vital function inside most media companies -- both big and small -- but the key performance indicators (KPI) used to evaluate the return on research investment varies considerably by the size of the organization. It also differs significantly from the value of research KPIs used by marketers, agencies and research companies too, according to the fourth in a series of "Organizational Benchmark" studies conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation.
- Improper site IDs and outdated operating systems are among suspicious signals that should be monitored to control CTV ad fraud, according to an extensive analysis conducted by Sabio's CTV platform.
- Nearly a month into a grassroots campaign encouraging brand marketers to boycott social media platforms -- especially Facebook -- that enable hate and disinformation to spread, awareness and support among American consumers has grown considerably. That's the finding of a series of consumer tracking studies fielded by Horizon Media since the #StopHateForProfit campaign began in late June.
- Josh Chasin has joined an elite group in earning one of the industry's highest honors -- the ARF's 2020 "Erwin Ephron Demystification Award," whose previous recipients include Leslie Wood, Jim Spaeth, Dave Poltrack, Irwin Gotlieb, Bill Harvey, and Chasin's former Comscore boss, Gian Fulgoni.
- Job security anxiety continues, with 30% of currently employed U.S. consumers fearful they will lose their job.
- A story ("Gartner CMO Spend Survey Shows How Digital Budgets Will Increase In 2021") in the July 6, 2020 edition of "Search & Performance Marketing Daily" stated that digital advertising business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing budgets are expected to grow by 78% in aggregate in 2021, according to Gartner's 2020-2021 CMO Spend Survey. The Gartner research stat is specific to the number of CMOs who expect digital advertising to increase, not how much digital advertising will increase.
- Six substantive waves of multinational consumer research studies into the COVID-19 pandemic, Kantar has defined a new consumer segmentation schema based on how the crisis has transformed consumer psyches and behaviors. Ranging from the biggest segment ("Good Citizens," representing 22% of the population) to the smallest ("Ostriches" and "Hibernators," 12% each), the latest edition of Kantar's COVID-19 Barometer clusters them based on their propensity to be informed, worried, follow the rules or trust what their governments are doing to combat the pandemic.
- While the role of advertising agencies remains in question for various forms of advertising and media, content marketing appears to be heading favorably in the direction of conventional ad agencies, including media services shops. At least that was the finding of a survey conducted by the Association of National Advertisers in 2019, prior to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- GlobalWebIndex this morning unveiled a new "mobile-first" panel enabling it to survey enhanced demographics such as gender identity and sexual orientation for the LGBTQ segment of the U.S. population, among other things, as part of an ongoing effort to expand the representation of cultural identity, race and ethnicity in its massive consumer database.
- Although most ad execs expect their budgets to decline for the foreseeable future due to COVID-19, the rate of ad budget erosion appears to be moderating, according to findings of the latest edition of Advertiser Perceptions' special COVID-19 tracking studies.
