Executive Summary

The Global Media Intelligence Report is a concise yet detailed compilation of data and insights about consumers’ traditional and digital media usage in 40 key markets worldwide. For this 2018 edition, we’ve made some changes, but the focus remains the same: to provide the in-depth information about consumer behavior that advertisers and marketers need to create and execute effective campaigns.

Here are the key trends dominating the media landscape this year:

The world has gone mobile. Smartphone ownership among internet users was well over 90% in the majority of countries surveyed by GlobalWebIndex. A few advanced economies—including Belgium, Canada and France—did register penetration below 90%, but these are affluent nations where PCs were widely available and well established for online access before smartphones came on the scene.

The global proliferation of smartphones—and the many hours each day that internet users spend with these devices—have encouraged all advertisers to boost their investments on mobile platforms. As a result, there’s no end in sight to the mobile ad spending boom. eMarketer estimates that global outlays on mobile ads will rise 32.1% in 2018, to just over $189 billion. Strong double-digit growth will continue through 2022.

The world’s internet users have also embraced social networking. In Indonesia and Thailand, more than 90% of internet users had engaged with social media in the month prior to polling. Penetration was substantially lower—around 70%—in some Western European markets, such as France and Germany. But in most countries polled, more than 80% of internet users checked in to social sites or apps as a matter of course. Not only that, devotees of Instagram, Facebook and other social platforms spent significant periods of time there—more than 3 hours each day, for example, in countries including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt and Indonesia.