Curated Guide to Research
MediaPost's comprehensive guide to current research in the marketplace.
- The MRC Wednesday disclosed new milestones in the evolution of ad and media measurement standards, including the role of algorithms and the status of outcome measurement.
- While more attention leads to increased recall, shorter ads were more attention-efficient and did more work in a shorter period of time. Dentsu's "Attention Economy" research program is focused on measuring the true value of attention across channels, platforms, and formats, to reroute the way the ad industry judges an ad's real success.
- Estimates are that U.S. broadband-only homes will rise 42% to 54 million in five years from its current level of 38 million.
- Such viewers are more likely to buy from brands that advertise in such programming.
- Business and marketing leaders are at a tipping point in terms of customer experience and engagement, says Deloitte's Barbara Venneman.
- Some 64% of 18- to-44-year-olds in TV homes have a pay TV service, while nearly 80% of older TV households with 45+ do.
- Apple changed its software to give customers more control over the data they share with apps, driving up CPMs.
- Republican lawmakers are asking the companies for internal research related to their products' effect on the mental health of children and teens.
- Consumers have mixed attitudes about online advertising, with many people expressing concerns about privacy. More than two-thirds (69%) of people worldwide said they’re happy to see advertising if they get access to free news content, according to a survey by browser developer Opera and Eyeo, which makes Adblock Plus software. Though many consumers see value in online advertising, 48% of survey respondents said they were annoyed by retargeting that makes them feel as if they’re being followed around the internet. Eyeo and Opera surveyed more than 2,500 global internet users about their attitudes toward the browsing experience. Online audience tracking is expected to become more difficult as technology companies give consumers more tools to protect their privacy. Apple in 2020 blocked third-party cookies in its Safari web browser, while Google has delayed plans to end support for the tracking technology until 2023. Consumers also are ambivalent about ad cookies, with 39% saying they find constant advertising cookie consent requests irritating, while 35% said they recognize the role of cookies in the browsing experience and are happy to accept them.
- There have been only two instances, more than 20 years apart, when Nielsen was forced to completely overhaul how it reported television audiences - in 1987, when the switch was made from the antiquated household meter/diary system to national people meters, and in 2009, when DVRs and time-shifted viewing led to the switch from program ratings to average commercial minute ratings (C3). How those two fundamental changes were implemented shows how much the industry's priorities have changed over time - or really how the speed of change in the access to video content and in consumer behavior has caused good research to take a back seat to rushing new products to market.
- The Statista survey for Magnite also finds CTV viewers to mirror U.S. population demographics, versus traditional TV viewers skewing to 55-plus, white demographics.
- A report is linking some huge brands to Cambodia’s disappearing forest. The biggest offenders over the past three years, based on data gleaned from the Open Apparel Registry, included Bestseller, C&A, Gap, H&M, Levi Strauss, Next, Ralph Lauren and Sainsbury’s-owned Tu.
- It wasn't a good day for companies that rely on ad revenue. The technology industry lost billions this morning -- especially those focused more heavily on advertising.
- Amazon has emerged as the third-biggest digital advertising platform in the United States.
- For long-term business model stability, addressing invasiveness concerns is as or more important than tackling annoying ad repetitiveness.
- Harley-Davidson, BMW, and Honda all showed improvement this year, while Chevrolet, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz all declined.
- More households have hooked up their TVs directly to the internet, giving marketers another way to reach consumers who watch free ad-supported streamers.
- Kroger Precision Marketing on Wednesday announced the launch of a private programmatic ad marketplace that enables agencies and brands to reach consumers through Kroger's audience data and preferred ad-buying platform.
- Consumers and brands have different views about the building blocks of trust, Deloitte Digital and Twilio report.
- Somewhat predictably, the percentages using phones for streaming decline incrementally with age, with just 27% of boomers reporting the behavior.
- A comprehensive SEO strategy accounts for considerations from macro-level, industry-wide trends to the most micro-level elements of keyword usage, text formatting, or page mark-up. Achieving a balance and knowing precisely where to focus your efforts is essential.
- Ad viewability during the first half of the year mostly improved in the United States, in line with a broader global trend, according to the Media Quality Report by researcher Integral Ad Sciences. The biggest improvement was seen in mobile app display ads, whose viewability rate hit 85.2%, a 6.3 percentage points improvement from a year earlier. Other categories of advertising were mostly stable in the United States. Looking at global trends, mobile apps were the only environment whose display viewability level increased, rising 2.4 percentage points to reach 73.2% in in the first half. Mobile app display viewability increased most in Singapore, up 8.7 percentage points, and New Zealand, up 7.5 percentage points. For desktop video, viewability rose 1.8 percentage points to hit 77% worldwide as Germany and Australia posted notable improvements. France and Canada were the only countries to experience declines in desktop video viewability. IAS didn’t have an annual comparison for connected TV (CTV), but said it was the most-viewable format globally, reaching 93.2% in the first half. That viewability rate put CTV ahead of mobile web video (79%), mobile app video (78%) and desktop video (77%).
- While streaming's popularity continues, users are harder to keep, and are looking for interaction via social video and social gaming, concludes the digital media trends survey.
- Veteran media research exec Vijoy Gopalakrishnan has joined iSpot.tv as chief research officer, largely to further the media research company's "currency" initiatives.
- Affluent households are spending more time with electronic media than they did before the pandemic, a trend that has yet to reverse as the economy reopens. Consumers with a household income of more than $125,000 increased their total time spent with media by 16% from a year earlier to 41.9 hours in 2021, according to the latest survey from consumer research firm Ipsos. Live TV maintained its top spot as the most popular media outlet, though viewing time slipped from a mean of 9.4 hours a week to 9.3 hours in the past year. Streaming services also lost viewing time, falling from 7.9 hours a week to 7.3 hours. That time was spread among a growing number of platforms. Watching on-demand TV, watching videos on YouTube and listening to streamed audio were among the media activities that saw gains in the past year. The affluent consumer group consists of 75.8 million adults in 23.2 million households, according to Ipsos.
- The ad industry has realized that "device metrics" that were proxies for attention and standards like viewability do not necessarily equate to a true "opportunity to see," according to Joanne Leong, vp, global media partnerships, dentsu international.
- Acceptance of technology has increased vs. 2019, but shoppers still have concerns, AMA-NY reports.
- The most common forms of discrimination were family status and age, according to a global survey by Kantar.
- Thanks to wider use of sophisticated brand suitability and risk prevention strategies, brand risk for desktop display campaigns dropped by 2.4 points in the U.S. in the period.
- Google and Facebook will continue to dominate the global stage for digital advertising, though retailers are becoming a bigger threat.
