Snapchat: Snapchat has also seen growth in time spent, the combined result of COVID-19 as well as increased use of things like AR filters, video calling and Discover content. We expect that US users will spend an average of 30 minutes per day on the app in 2020, up from our previous forecast of 27 minutes. Here too, we don’t expect the bump to carry over beyond this year.

Digital media is relatively flexible, which has benefited it during the pandemic. Ivan Markman, chief business officer at Verizon Media, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss how digital platforms can be even better at supporting this flexibility, as well as the explosion of connected TV advertising and the future of virtual and augmented reality.

Newer and more technical marketing executions around esports and gaming, wearables, augmented reality, and programmatic marketing favored agency relationships. Roughly one-quarter of respondents handled programmatic marketing solely in-house, while 30% used a hybrid model of brand-agency execution and 46% farmed it out entirely to an agency partner.

This will enable more mobile augmented reality (AR) and mobile gaming. Even under 4G LTE, many big tech companies are exploring streaming gaming platforms, such as Microsoft’s xCloud, Google Stadia and Sony’s PlayStation Now. All came out in 2019, but the big test will be whether gamers embrace them in 2020.

What’s Up With Augmented Reality? Facebook appears to be stepping up its work in AR, and introduced more features for developers and creators. AR enables a user to interact with virtual objects and other types of digital information that is overlaid on top of real-world views.

These included a range of shopping tools on Facebook’s properties, ads on Instagram’s IGTV, new video ad formats and AR advertising capabilities on Snapchat, and new or improved ad formats on Twitter, such as Branded Likes and redesigned Amplify video ads.

While it's partly due to COVID-19, Snapchat was already seeing increased time spent with AR lenses, as well as original shows and other content on the Discover page. This year, daily time spent among adult Snapchat users will grow 12.0% to 29.5 minutes per day, a jump of 3 minutes over 2019. Our previous estimates had Snapchat adding just 30 seconds per day this year among adult users.

Trend No. 5: Mobile AR Will Become Commonplace. AR has already grown rapidly in the past two years following the release of a variety of AR developer platforms, including ARKit from Apple, ARCore from Google and AR Studio from Facebook. But not all phones can handle the capabilities of these platforms.

Some of the most exciting new AR products at CES were glasses and headsets.

Augmented reality (AR): Snapchat has embraced AR advertising, and its filters and lenses have led the industry. Facebook is catching up, however, rolling out its own AR capabilities. Still, Snapchat’s lead will give it some cushion against its larger rival.

Augmented Reality. Visual search and AR both rely on image recognition tools, but they are distinct technologies. In AR, image recognition tools identify faces or objects to layer additional information or images on top of a real-time view, whether on a smartphone screen, car windshield, eyeglass lenses or a headset.