In August, ad spending dropped for the third month in a row. But the outlook for spending isn’t so cut and dry. “If you start at that pre-pandemic point and you plot a curve to where we are now, we're actually not doing so badly,” our analyst Paul Verna said on a recent “Behind the Numbers” podcast.

The larger the mobile ad, the more time spent looking at it. Static interscroller ads, which fill the screen once users scroll past a certain point, receive the most attention from smartphone users worldwide—an average of 3.3 seconds. For the video interscroller format, that figure is 3.0 seconds.

Amazon’s $1 billion-a-year Thursday Night Football bet appears to be paying off, drawing record Prime sign-ups and reinforcing advertisers’ confidence in Amazon’s streaming tech. Once a pillar of pay TV, live sports have become the next big thing in streaming.

YouTube is toying with its ad strategy. The platform is beefing up Shorts by including ads; it tested users’ ad tolerance by running as many as 10 unskippable ads before videos. The experiment has been a headache for users, but the central question isn't new: How many ads and ad breaks will users put up with?

Apple’s just-released iOS 16 allows users to customize lock screens, control notifications further, and (at long last) edit text messages within 15 minutes. You know what else is changing at Apple? Its advertising strategy.

Overall digital ad spending in the US is set to grow by 17.8% in 2022, a steep deceleration from 2021’s 38.3% boom but still ahead of 2020’s pandemic-skewed slowdown. Industry-level digital ad spending has mirrored these extreme swings in recent years—with individual highs and lows often spread far apart from the median. Starting this year, however, most industries will settle into more steady spending patterns closer to the national average.

Healthcare delivery went digital in 2020, and so did healthcare and pharma ad budgets. In fact, 2020 was the only year in which healthcare and pharma overindexed the overall market digital ad spending growth.

TikTok announced new Shopping Ads this week in an effort to streamline in-app ecommerce.

The US advertising market is being dragged by the ear into a new, more privacy-focused era. Thanks to regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the US, the market’s largest players—particularly Google and Apple—are making it harder for third-party firms to surveil the browsing behavior of internet users, chiefly by ending support for third-party identifiers and requiring users to consent to being tracked online.

The most serious threat to Google’s ad tech dynasty is regulation. Google has been at the center of countless antitrust lawsuits worldwide, with governing bodies slowly forcing more balance in the advertising marketplace.

The US insurance industry will top $12 billion in digital ad spending this year, up 15.0% from 2021. Outlays will continue to increase by double-digit rates over the next couple of years, surpassing $15 billion in 2024.

Among major streaming video platforms, Peacock is the one where US subscribers are most likely to have the ad-supported version. Just 20% of Peacock subscribers shell out for the ad-free tier.

Over the course of 2021, the Chinese government promulgated two groundbreaking laws governing the country’s digital economy. The Data Security Law (DSL) and the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) were introduced throughout H1 and implemented in H2.

This year, 57% of US video ad spending will go to linear TV, a decline from 62% in 2021 and 71% in 2020. By comparison, ad spend share is increasing for connected TV (CTV) and other digital formats such as social video.

Search advertising is the oldest form of digital promotion, with roots in Google’s rise during the late 1990s. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) were disciplines that brought legitimacy to digital marketing departments. The sustained performance of search to this day is a big part of why Google remains such a powerful digital ad platform.

Amazon will make up 77.7% of US ecommerce channel ad revenues this year, contributing $27.94 billion of the $35.96 billion total.

With a category as broad as display advertising, any emerging trend is bound to have ad spending implications. A handful of hot topics, from the deprecation of third-party identifiers to the metaverse, will have varied levels of influence on display ad spending this year.

TikTok’s recent advances in its ad technology are making it easier for advertisers to plug into the platform and make buys. Since launching its self-serve ad platform in July 2020, TikTok has greatly expanded its targeting, custom content creation, and bidding capabilities.

Much of the money exiting linear TV won’t go very far, partly because many Americans are shifting their behavior from one content source to another while using the same device.

Close to 8 in 10 branding professionals plan on allocating upfront spending to Hulu, per a survey from iSpot.tv. Peacock and YouTube TV are also major upfront spend magnets with 52% and 49% of branding professionals dishing ad dollars to those platforms, respectively.