eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Jasmine Enberg discusses when travel (and travel advertising) will recover and some good and not-so-good examples of how travel advertisers are running campaigns. She then talks about whether Twitter can make a space for healthy conversations, our expectations for WhatsApp, and the significance of social platforms ending the year looking more alike than ever.

Travel ad dollars fly higher

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 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.

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 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.

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.

The travel industry has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic unlike any other. Everyone from airlines to hotels to travel retailers have had to halt much of their operations and marketing as a majority of consumers around the world shelter in place.

The coronavirus has upended the US travel industry. Fears of infection, governmental measures restricting travel and access to public places, and the economic downturn will depress bookings, sales and ad spending in 2020 and beyond.

eMarketer principal analysts Mark Dolliver and Nicole Perrin join junior analyst Blake Droesch, and vice president of content studio at Insider Intelligence Paul Verna to discuss the "minimigration" from major social networks to self-proclaimed "free speech" app Parler, targeted ads on network TV, the popularity of Starbucks mobile ordering, Netflix linear TV offering, The New York Times' digital milestone, how to travel to work at the speed of sound, and more.

Prior to the pandemic, we expected search ad spending to grow by 14.4% this year as part of a trend of gradually slowing growth from 2018 through the end of our forecast period in 2024. When the pandemic upended those expectations, we revised our outlook in anticipation of a virtual halt to travel industry search spending. But as more information has come in throughout the summer and early fall about the pace of consumer ecommerce spending, we have again updated our estimates of search ad spending in 2020—this time, in a positive direction.

The way consumers in China are shopping for luxury goods is changing amid the pandemic, with more purchases happening locally because of shelter-in-place protocols and travel restrictions.

In a challenging year for advertising worldwide, Germany will experience a slowdown similar to that of every other market we track. Germany’s digital ad spending had grown at double-digit rates for each of the past three years, but pandemic-disrupted 2020 will see that growth slow to just 0.8%.