eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Debra Aho Williamson discusses Snapchat's latest earnings, what stands out, and how this year will look. She then talks about which alternative social media platforms are most likely to rival the giants in the near future and why.

Early in the pandemic, digital audio took a huge hit in user engagement and in the amount of time listeners were spending with the medium. Many observers, including us, predicted dire results in the short term. However, the rest of the year played out very differently than those early weeks, and we ultimately revised our 2020 estimate from a 1.0% decline in the time US adults spent with digital audio to 8.3% growth, for a total of 1 hour, 29 minutes (1:29) per day.

More brands and agencies are using connected TV (CTV) as a direct-response performance channel. SteelHouse’s CTV ad platform saw a nearly 70% year-over-year increase in the number of advertisers compared to Q4 2019.

Where are millennials stocking up on stocks?

Retail ecommerce was thrust forward in 2020, mostly due to periodic stay-at-home measures enacted across the country. During mandated quarantines in the first wave of the pandemic and a second wave in the fall that coincided with the holiday shopping season, consumers shopped online to a degree they never had before. Retailers in Canada quickly adapted to these new conditions, setting them up for continued high volumes of online ordering in 2021.

Digital has been a retail reality for UK shoppers over much of the past year, thanks to lockdown orders requiring nonessential retailers to shutter their physical stores for long periods of time.