Here’s how supply chain hiccups will weigh on the holiday season.

“Women hold up half the sky,” former Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said. More than fifty years on, women in China are doing so online, driving digital trends and fast becoming a cohort that marketers ignore at their peril.

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.

We expect a shift in US digital ad spending next year, as economic factors weigh on certain industries. In 2020, financial services will displace the auto sector, while travel will surpass consumer packaged goods (CPG).

AmazonFresh, Amazon Pantry and Amazon’s Whole Foods operation cater specifically to the consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. But almost none of the retail giant’s CPG sales come from Amazon-branded goods.

The retail ecommerce ecosystem in China is extremely diverse. While Alibaba and JD.com are the clear sales leaders, a handful of other players are holding their own, sometimes by carving out a niche market, be it Suning in consumer electronics or Mogujie in women’s apparel.

According to a January 2019 survey from influencer marketing agency Mediakix, 61% of US marketers agreed that it’s difficult to find the right influencers for a campaign. And more than one in four US marketers said that brand safety and alignment was a challenge when it comes to influencer marketing.

With its increased investment in Instagram Stories, Benefit plans to focus on both organic and paid content in 2019. And rising usage in swipe-up behavior—when a user swipes up on stories content and is taken to a landing page on the brand's website—is opening the door to new opportunities.

Amazon might not be the first retailer that comes to mind for health, personal care and beauty products, but it's the third-fastest-growing category by our estimates. We forecast that Amazon's US sales of those products will reach $16 billion this year, a 37.9% increase over 2017.

In a physical retail environment, packaging continues to influence consumers' purchasing decisions. This is not just from a design or visual standpoint, but also from a desire for more information.

Laura Brinker, vice president of beauty brand partnerships at Influenster, explains why the influencer market has evolved toward microinfluencers, and why influencer marketing is here to stay.

eMarketer recently published several Amazon forecasts, including retail ecommerce sales, direct vs. marketplace sales, retail ecommerce sales by product category, Amazon Prime users and households, and Amazon smart speaker users.