After a voracious 2018, the appetite for marketing and/or ad technology M&A deals ebbed 15% in 2019, according to an annual year-end analysis released today by industry tracker R3 Worldwide. "Though
mar-tech and ad-tech have driven M&A value, there has been more interest in acquisitions that will increase regional presence and serviceability," explains R3 Principal Greg Paull.
Linear TV networks' national tv advertising continues to slip in the wake of growing media competition -- especially in prime time -- dropping 5% for the 2018-2019 TV season from the previous year.
Instagram will continue to grow in unique users and share of advertising budgets, but its rate of growth is beginning to moderate, according to estimates released today by eMarketer. In fact,
Instagram's user growth slowed to single digits -- +6.7% -- in the U.S. in 2019, according to eMarketer, which predicts its will continue to flatten over the next several years.
While Fox News remains the most dominant source of right-wing news coverage, several up-and-comers have been ascending, as least in terms of digital unique user gains, according to a year-end analysis
of Comscore data released today by TheRighting. TheBlaze posted a 41% increase and The Washington Examiner rose 42%, while Foxnews.com rose 7% in November 2019.
If estimates for Fox's sales for units in its coverage of Super Bowl XIV next month hold up, it will represent a 15% increase over last year's ad sales for the Big Game, and an 88% jump from 2010,
according to estimates released today by competitive ad tracker Kantar. The super ad price inflation has come despite some erosion in average ratings, as well as increased commercial clutter.
Continuous intelligence -- the ability to continuously analyze and extract data from search and internet-connected devices -- will consolidate the IoT analytics market and enable more advanced
analytics in near real-time, ABI Research says.
Although time-shifted viewing for traditional TV networks continues to show slight growth, viewing for the average prime-time non-sports show among the five major broadcast networks has declined.
While most people worldwide consider themselves to be happy, the percentage slipped six percentage points in 2019 from 2018, according to IPSOS' annual year-in-review of global consumer research
trends.
Two President -- the current one and former President Barack Obama -- tied as the "most admired man" of 2019, according to an annual poll released today by Gallup. It was also the 12th time President
Obama ranked in the top spot, and the first for the current President, albeit in a tie.
Readers of Research Intelligencer apparently are most interested in themselves, or as the case may be, their peers. That appears to be the case based on an analysis of the top Research Intelligencer
stories of 2019. Half the top 10 stories of the year were about media agencies and/or proprietary research they conducted. A couple of others were about innovative Nielsen research developments,
including its first-ever cross-platform deduplication analysis, as well as its contrivance of the industry's longest acronym to date: the "OTA+vMVPD" audience segment.
In its latest ad trends report industry research service WARC has identified three broad trends in 2019.
Marketers still expect to use other media measurement tools like media-mix modeling, especially in tracking traditional media.
Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller answered top-of-mind questions on everything from crawl-rate settings in Google Search Console to the differences between data in Google Analytics and
Search Console.
The Tom Steyer 2020 campaign has spent $17.3 million on national/regional TV commercials, while the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign has spent $13.8 million for the period from Nov. 26 through Dec. 25,
according to iSpot.tv.
Black professionals working in the Midwest are most prone to experience prejudice at work, according to findings of "Being Black in Corporate America," an in-depth study of racism in corporate America
released this month by the Center for Talent Innovation. The study, which was sponsored by Interpublic and other major corporations, was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago, and found that Northeastern states were less likely by nearly half to represent a prejudiced corporate work space for Black professionals.
The percentage of advertisers in North America that had adopted MTA methods rose to 45% this year from 41% in 2018, according to a survey by the Mobile Marketing Association.
The report, sponsored by Interpublic and other major corporations, found that black professionals hold only 3.2% of all executive or senior leadership roles in the U.S. and less than 1% of all
Fortune 500 CEO positions.
At presstime, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) estimated more than 1.3 billion Christmas gifts have already been delivered, albeit mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere where Santa was
already being tracked making his rounds somewhere over China, en route to Australia.
TikTok's focus on spontaneous video entertainment helps to differentiate the platform from other social media platforms like Facebook, according to eMarketer.
Demand for U.S. advertising reached its highest point of the year in November, but actually declined 3.7% from November 2018, according to the latest monthly U.S. Ad Market Tracker.
For me, the study presented several unanswered questions. I wondered how personalization or location of IP address might skew the query results. So I reached out to ask the authors of the report -
Bing's Top Search Results Contain an Alarming Amount of Disinformation.
Those laws could be the benchmark for even tougher federal privacy legislation, researchers say.
Multi-touch attribution use is growing. But only a minority of firms have integrated it into their media mix, the MMA reports.
A report released this week found Bing's search engine results are filled with bad information much more often than Google's.
While 14% of surveyed digital commerce leaders consider social commerce the most important sales channel currently, 20% expect it to be most dominant in 10 years, according to Wunderman Thompson
Commerce.
Agency execs are somewhat more pessimistic about the direction of the ad and media services industry than their clients, according to findings of a study by Advertiser Perceptions for "Research
Intelligencer." The findings show a majority of both groups believe the industry is "going through a difficult time," but a slightly higher percentage of agency respondents said they feel that way.
Moreover, 3% of agency executives describe it as "going horribly wrong."
A majority of ad industry executives believe the advertising and media services business is "going through a difficult time," according to findings of interviews conducted by Advertiser Perceptions in
December.
MediaPost is collaborating with the equities research team at Raymond James to field a comprehensive survey of ad industry executives on the advertising and media-buying outlooks for 2020. If you'd
like to receive an advance copy of the findings, just participate in the survey here. It's a bit long, but that just means you'll get detailed, valuable insights back in return for your time. If you
don't want to participate, you'll still get to see the results when we publish them later in January.
The so-called wearables market -- wearable devices such as smartwatches, headphones, and other accessories tethered to a smartphone, PC or other internet connected device -- now comprises about a
fifth of the U.S. population, according to updated estimates released today by eMarketer.
While overall multicultural advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. is growing at about the rate of the general marketplace, some ethnic segments are growing faster than others, especially
media targeting Asian Americans. Overall multicultural spending few 5.6% in 2018, according to the latest edition of PQ Media's Multicultural Media Forecast, but it grew 6.1% for media targeting
African Americans, and 7.0% targeting Asian Americans.