Looking ahead to 2021, healthcare and pharma will continue to increase investments in desktop/laptop—growing 17.5% to reach $4.75 billion—but the share of total digital ad spending allocated to those devices will fall slightly, to 42.3%. Aiding this growth will be investments in connected TV (CTV), which we include in our desktop/laptop figures.

The financial services sector will continue to increase its investments in digital advertising this year despite the pandemic. Shifting consumer behavior toward digital banking services and heightened interest in personal finance has given financial services companies good reasons to continue advertising.

In spite of that drop in investment, however, mobile will account for 78.5% of entertainment digital ad spending overall. Mobile spend by both media and entertainment should rebound rather quickly next year, once the industries themselves bounce back. In 2021, the media category will spend $4.26 billion on mobile ads, up 14.7% YoY.

Marketers’ tendency to place more focus on business performance and return on investment (ROI) during difficult times, coupled with programmatic's efficient audience-targeting capabilities, give the ad-buying method an advantage. And leading digital platforms—including short-form video apps Kuaishou and Douyin (known as TikTok internationally)—have been rapidly automating their ad-selling processes.

This is a great example of how a legacy brand that isn't necessarily set up for D2C, because of its investment in influencer and digital and data, has been able to exploit this behavioral change.”.

Spotify’s heavy investment in podcasts and more robust metrics on its platform may accelerate standardization in the industry to include more consumption data. It would be a positive development because of the unique aspects of podcast listening. “Completion rates are just insane,” Zohrob said.

During a year where investments in most advertising channels shrunk or stalled, connected TV ad spending is poised to keep growing.

They will find refuge in an emerging wave of RaaS providers delivering off-the-shelf, on-demand services that have the potential to transform formerly cost-prohibitive capital investments into digestible as-you-go variable costs—for both digital and brick-and-mortar businesses.

In October 2020, marketing tech consultancy DemandLab and marketing research firm Ascend2 found that data quality was the leading barrier to revenue attribution success, cited by 43% of marketing professionals surveyed worldwide. About one in four (26%) also said data silos were a problem.

This big decline is driven by paused investment in traditional media, such as TV, radio, print and out-of-home (OOH), as well as abandoned plans to use traditional advertising to promote large-scale industry conferences. However, we do anticipate the market to recover by 2021, with a 20.4% increase to $25.79 billion.

This D2C consideration also plays into the other “status quo” trend that we continue to see in the CPG space, of mobile investments growing at the expense of desktop/laptop. This year, 82.1% of CPG brands’ digital advertising investments will go toward mobile, making CPG the most penetrated industry for mobile advertising that we track.

Unlike media mix modeling, where investments can be measured in a very scientific way, social listening is “more anecdotal,” Viden of CommonSpirit Health said. “I don't know that I could put a number on it, but I do know the value of it.