More retailers are selling profitable ad space to other brands and CPGs—and deciding to expand their retail media networks to generate even more sales. In a recent survey, more than one-third of professionals said they anticipate ad revenue growth between 26% and 75%.

The CPG industry will increase its investments in digital advertising this year as strong sales of essential goods and personal care products—particularly on ecommerce platforms—gave advertisers reasons to keep spending during the pandemic.

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.

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. Any growth is good growth in the current environment, but this will represent the most modest growth across all the industries we forecast to increase spending this year.

The mid-roll ads operate differently from pre-roll ads in order to ensure the livestreams are not interrupted. On Twitch, mid-roll ads run when a streamer triggers an ad break on their channel. YouTube also allows creators to manually insert mid-roll ads during their streams. On Facebook Live, the livestream continues while the mid-roll ad plays in a small floating window.

Digital ad spending held the line to a much greater extent than any category of traditional ad spending—to the great benefit of digital ad publishers. Traditional advertising on TV, radio, and print had already been struggling, but in 2020 ad spending in these channels took a nosedive compared with our pre-pandemic expectations.

In the CPG space, the balance of spend across devices will tip even further in mobile’s favor this year. CPG brands will spend 82.1% of their digital ad budgets on mobile, compared with 17.9% on desktop/laptop ads.

“TikTok encourages advertisers to create TikToks versus ads, which is a departure from the more consistent brand-building messages we can deliver with frequency in other channels,” Post’s Carson said. Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube will offer comfort and familiarity.

For lower-consideration products—particularly consumer goods—checkout presents a unique challenge. Consumers don’t want to make one-off purchases of $5 consumer products. They’re more accustomed to adding them to a larger basket of goods.

User-generated short videos are all over the internet, from TikTok to Instagram Reels to Triller, and the marketing opportunities are exploding. Here’s how the main venues compare across usage, paid advertising, organic and influencer marketing, and commerce.

Earlier this week, Mars Wrigley’s M&M's brand gave fans a sneak peak of its Super Bowl ad via Zoom, its first-ever "virtual" debut. It’s just one of several efforts the company is working on leading up to Sunday’s big game.

eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman, research analyst Daniel Keyes, and senior forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence Cindy Liu discuss what they're paying attention to in 2021 and why: same-day delivery, what's next for consumer packaged goods and grocery ecommerce, autonomous checkout, reimagining brick-and-mortar, and the convergence of media and commerce.

"There's certainly a drive from advertisers to have more attributable activity from our influencers," said Mary Keane-Dawson, group CEO of influencer marketing agency Takumi. “Fast-moving consumer goods brands and self-care brands need to be able to sell products. It's completely logical to have a performance element to it.”.