In a difficult year for advertising worldwide, digital ad spending in Germany will see only 0.8% growth. Most of the industries we break out will decelerate their digital ad spend to some degree, while travel and auto will reduce theirs dramatically.

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 accelerated payments industry digitization across the entire landscape, as merchants turned to ecommerce to keep doors open, consumers eschewed cash in favor of electronic and contactless payments, and payments technology providers rapidly developed and launched new solutions to keep up.

The pandemic has caused the US automotive industry to reduce its digital ad spending by 18.2% in 2020. As car sales plummeted, dealerships closed, and manufacturing slowed, marketers backed off from performance initiatives and focused on branding efforts.

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.

Automotive digital ad spending will grow by 21.4% in 2021 to $13.29 billion, slightly below its pre-pandemic peak.

In terms of the allocations of spend across industries, 2020 will be a story of two trends. On one hand, digital ad investments (and advertising investments overall, for that matter) in some sectors will decline immensely as a result of those industries facing insurmountable barriers. On the other, the pandemic will allow certain other industries to remain resilient in terms of digital spend, with relatively strong growth forecasts for the year. It comes as no surprise that the automotive and travel industries will experience huge spending declines in 2020. As the UK imposed strict lockdown rules, pretty much all travel was nixed for several months. Investment in digital advertising by these two industries will thus suffer, with spend declining by 20.4% for auto and by 36.7% for travel this year.

The US automotive industry will spend just $10.94 billion on digital advertising this year, down by 18.2% from 2019.

eMarketer principal analysts Nicole Perrin and Yory Wurmser join vice president of content studio Paul Verna to chat about whether the ad industry has a fundamental problem, a possible solution for the struggling newspaper business, marketing strategies of the latest video streaming platforms, how to make parts of your car invisible and more.

No industry has been as devastated by the coronavirus pandemic and its effects as travel. Airlines, car rental agencies, hotels and resorts, online booking services, cruises and destination marketing organizations, and business travel support services found their operations ground to a near-halt for much of Q2 2020, and the situation has barely improved in H2.

Germany’s auto industry is central to the economy of the country and the region. But because of macroeconomic trends—like the volatility of the US-China trade negotiations and US President Donald Trump’s mixed trade signals on German cars—the automotive sector in Germany is underspending on ads compared with other industries. The medium-term prognosis remains uncertain.

Lingering uncertainty over Brexit has had an impact on all industries across the British economy, but the automotive sector has been hit particularly hard, which has affected how much it can spend on digital ads.