When US advertisers pulled back spending dramatically in March, one of the earliest noticeable effects on the display ad market was falling CPMs. At the same time as marketers were lowering their demand for ads—either to take spending cuts as savings or merely pause and rework their messaging—consumers were spending more time on social and traditional media properties, increasing the supply of impressions. A decline in prices was the natural outcome.

As Americans hunkered down under stay-at-home guidelines for much of March and April, they unsurprisingly consumed more mobile media. The added mobile time, however, wasn’t distributed equally.

To help digital advertisers understand the critical choices and game-changing solutions that lie before them, Myles blends his past experience as a builder of ad tech (specifically, a dynamic ad creative platform) and a B2B marketer. He's worked across technologies and verticals including ad tech, enterprise software, cloud computing and finance.

Additionally, we recently did advertising with [in-game advertising platform] Bidstack on Barstool Sports, and it had 300,000 views for a horse racing toy that people gambled on. It was pretty wild because there are no live sports. We're just finding creative ways to advertise. Are any other channels working well for you right now? Our email open rates have gone up with more people at home.

Gaming has gone mainstream, with 86% of internet users worldwide noting they have gamed on at least one device within the past month, and that figure climbed to 92% among those ages 16 to 24, according to a March 2019 report from GlobalWebIndex.

Apple launched its subscription gaming service Arcade in late September as part of the company’s wider iOS 13 release, betting big on subscription gaming services and joining others like Google and Microsoft. As more adults spend time with mobile gaming apps daily, these companies are steadily developing their mobile gaming strategies.

And as we head into the Christmas holiday season, significant new releases from Sony and Microsoft in the gaming space (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, respectively) means advertising spend in this space will also be significant. CPG Digital Ad Spending. Advertisers of consumer packaged goods (CPG) in the UK will spend £2.04 billion ($2.60 billion) on digital ads in 2020, up 6.6% year over year.

When adding in other types of livestreaming that CivicScience didn’t ask about (such as watching influencers or video game play), the percentage using livestreaming would likely be several notches higher.

The pandemic put pressure on media budgets and changed users’ listening behaviors, forcing advertisers to restructure their audio strategies.