The reports in this collection look at ad spending in the retail, financial services, computing products and consumer electronics, automotive, telecom, travel, health and pharma, media and entertainment, and CPG industries. Countries covered in this report series include the US, UK, and Germany.

The pandemic has greatly affected the distribution of digital ad spending across industries. The bottom fell out of the travel industry, as will ad spending in the sector, while retail will consolidate its dominant position in digital ad spend this year.

Even before the pandemic, ecommerce channel advertising was attracting a lot of attention from advertisers—especially in verticals like consumer packaged goods (CPG)—as well as retailers, which hoped to add new higher-margin revenue streams to their businesses after seeing Amazon’s success in the area. Amazon had become the No. 3 digital ad seller in the US thanks primarily to placements on its ecommerce property, and companies including Walmart, Target, and eBay had been growing similar businesses.

In a difficult year for digital advertising overall, US travel industry spending will decline faster than any other vertical. It will bring up the rear in total spending and claim the smallest market share of all industries we cover.

In a difficult year for retail sales overall, the US retail industry will remain the largest spender on digital advertising among all verticals, despite a huge deceleration in growth.

Our ad spend by industry forecasts from August last year were already painting a bleak picture for the travel sector—a 36.7% decline in digital ad spend in 2020—and our update later this year is unlikely to contain any significant upticks. The saving grace for search, though, was the strong showing for ecommerce—retail ecommerce sales in the UK grew 34.7% in 2020.