6 in 19: Data and Digital Trends to Watch Closely
By: Michael Moschella
Tags: Data Science, Social Media, Advertising, Marketing, Business

Last January, we covered the 5 Must-Knows to Reach Your Target Audience in 2018 and now we’re back and upping the ante with 6 more. To recap:

E-commerce has continued to drive US retail sales growth, with Statista reporting “roughly 230 million Americans will make an online purchase this year, spending a total of $474 billion.”

And, accordingly:

Digital media has continued to change the way Americans interact with news. According to Parse.ly, a mix of search, recirculation, texting, and social media makes up the vast majority of how we access online news.

So, what’s new in 2019?

1. Digital ad spending will continue to grow as traditional industries learn and adapt

We keep a close eye on how political campaigns spend their money, because scarce resources (and high regulation) means only the most proven tactics are widely deployed. According to ADWEEK, the 2018 midterm elections saw a massive spike in digital spending, outpacing the Presidential race in 2016:

Digital ads, which ran most often on Facebook and Google, almost quadrupled from 2014, jumping from $250 million to $950 million. The 2016 election digital ad spend was $650 million.

2. TV’s competition with other screens will get even tougher

Simply put, TV alone no longer captures our attention. Nielsen’s Insights tells us viewers are likely using a digital device while watching… often to share content or look up products that catch their attention.

This is especially true for the 18–34 year old age cohort, who are spending just two hours in front of the TV daily now. By comparison, 50–64 year olds spend over six hours!

via CNBC.com

The market is responding. On May 24, 2018, Netflix topped Disney and Comcast in market value (seen in the graph in red).

But it’s not just that Netflix is challenging the old TV ad model. The networks themselves are decreasing ads, led by NBCUniversal’s vow to cut primetime ads by 20% across the board.

“Where do the ads go?” Glad you asked. Here’s where:

3. The rise of video games and e-sports

DKC Analytics executed a national survey on behalf of Discord gaming platform that stunned us, showing that teens were spending as much time watching e-sports as real sports. Even more shocking are the 2018 revenue stats, with video games almost 4X the domestic box office haul.

Smart digital advertising budgets, product placement deals, e-sports sponsorship, and a host of other PR strategies won’t take too long to follow the money.

4. Even more innovation in personalized targeting data

Zenith’s global advertising forecast predicts a $72 billion increase in mobile internet (2017 to 2020) while newspaper ads will decline by $7 billion. All this mobile advertising creates an enormous wealth of behavioral data because we know if your cell phone was at location X in time Y if a mobile display ad was served.

But competitors of the mobile internet landscape won’t sit idly by. Two major data resources we’re excited to leverage are Amazon and addressable TV.

The New York Times makes the simple case for the value of Amazon’s targeting data:

Much of online advertising relies on imprecise algorithms that govern where marketing messages appear, and what impact they have on actual sales. Here, Amazon has a big advantage over its competitors. Thanks to its wealth of data and analytics on consumer shopping habits, it can put ads in front of people when they are more likely to be hunting for specific products and to welcome them as suggestions rather than see them as intrusions.

Cable companies are working overtime too, to perfect addressable TV systems that help deliver personalized ad content. eMarketer tells us that ad revenue for these products in 2019 should be double what it was in 2017.

5. TEXT TEXT TEXT

With the AARP reporting that 4 out of 5 people in their 50’s now have smartphones, the shift to mobile media is complete. There are no more holdouts. Everyone owning smartphones naturally leads to everyone texting… and this seriously impacts digital strategy.

Digital marketing plans increasingly needs to include text conversation strategies. Larry Kim has covered the rapid adoption of chat bots by major brands of all sorts:

Regardless of whether you’re at a store shopping for groceries, you can always search for recipes with the assistance of the Whole Foods bot on Facebook Messenger. One of the coolest parts is you can search by an emoji to get those recipes, and it also lets you filter recipes if you have special dietary needs.

This makes perfect sense when we consider that American teens simply don’t like to talk in-person as much. Common Sense Media reports that in 2012 almost half said their favorite way to communicate was in-person. By 2018, that number had fallen below one-third, eclipsed by texting at 35%. Selections of social media (16% overall) or video chat (10% overall) as favorites grew in levels exactly equal to in-person’s decline.

6. Look to Asia for leadership

The United Nations World Tourism Organization now estimates global Chinese tourism expenditures to be about twice that of the US. It follows that China is where we’re likely to see the largest growth in social media advertising revenue, according to Statista.

But wait, there’s more! The Asian market isn’t just valuable because it’s big. In this case, we can see a glimpse of what’s to come… and the answer is… Influencers Everywhere. Quartz reports that even the government of Singapore is in on the social influencer game:

According to Singapore’s Straits Times, the country’s ministry of finance paid more than 50 social media influencers to promote an initiative that educates citizens about the country’s 2018 budget and asks them for feedback. The result? Brightly lit photos of young, beautiful people with captions about “inflationary pressure.”

AND, built into the Asian social media world is the future of the cashless society, says WSJ.

Though the U.S. saw $112 billion of mobile payments in 2016 … such payments in China totaled $9 trillion.

That’s trillion with a “T.” AKA: 9,000,000,000,000.00. Even accounting for China’s larger population, that’s 19X more than the US in mobile payments per capita.

For Alibaba and Tencent, the payoff isn’t just the transaction fees they make from merchants, typically 0.6%. It’s also the consumer data collected, which can transform their apps into marketing platforms for an expanding array of services, from bike sharing to travel.

Now that’s a lot of data…

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