Nearly a quarter (23%) of loyalty program professionals, across industries, say their biggest challenge is offering deep enough discounts to attract customers, per a global survey by Eagle Eye. Another 23% have a hard time balancing margins with attractive discounts, and 21% find it difficult to deliver offers to customers at the right time.

Key stat: Google’s share of US nonretail search ad spend has declined since 2021, when the company saw $57.49 billion in US search ad revenues, according to our forecast. Among Google’s rivals outside of retail, both Microsoft and Apple are growing their search revenues faster.

This year, US social network ad spending will grow at its slowest pace since we began tracking it, at just 3.4%, to reach $68.45 billion, according to our forecast.

Key stat: The top way US internet users discover new mobile apps is by searching or browsing app stores, cited by 44% of those surveyed for Airship by Sapio Research.

Key stat: Among US adults who are very trusting of generative AI, 60% are men and 40% are women, according to Morning Consult. People who trust AI also tend to be millennials and have less than a college education.

Ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) services will gain more than triple the US viewers that subscription OTT video will this year, per our forecast. AVOD will add 13.3 million viewers, including 4.3 million from free premium platforms, for a total of 157.1 million. Meanwhile, subscription OTT services will gain 4.3 million viewers to reach 222.2 million.

There will be 90.0 million monthly users of augmented reality (AR) in the US this year, a figure that, despite decelerating growth, will cross the 100 million mark in 2025, according to our forecast. Virtual reality (VR) will hit 68.9 million users this year, though growth has also tapered off.

Lack of people and process training is the biggest obstacle to leveraging AI, cited by 42% of B2C professionals worldwide in a Twilio survey. Other barriers to AI adoption include security or compliance (36%), poor organizational processes (34%), and poor-quality data (31%).

Data security is the most important feature to adults worldwide when deciding whether to transact with a business online, according to TransUnion. An easy payment process is the second most important, followed by ease of login or authentication.

Internet use is growing the fastest in the Middle East and Africa, where about 80 million more people will go online at least once per month between 2023 and 2027, according to our forecast. Roughly 60% of the global population will use the internet regularly.

A quarter of US adults recently cut their spending on video streaming subscriptions due to inflation, per a Morning Consult survey. Slightly less cut back on music streaming subscriptions (24%) and cable or satellite TV (23%). Across all entertainment categories studied, more adults either didn’t pull back or didn’t pay for the product or service in the first place.

More than half (53%) of US TV advertisers say a lack of common metrics is a challenge to integrating linear and digital campaign data, according to Yahoo Advertising. Creating a holistic framework and navigating walled gardens’ data-sharing rules are hurdles for about 40% of TV advertisers each.

Nearly half (49.0%) of advertisers worldwide believe that activating their own first-party data is the most promising solution to cookie deprecation, according to DoubleVerify. However, only 16.6% of publishers say the same of this solution. Publishers’ top choice for replacing cookie-dependent tools is publisher first-party data activation, chosen as a promising solution by just 27.1% of advertisers.

The US isn’t the only country with serious talks of TikTok bans. Japan, the UK, Germany, and France are all countries with over 15 million TikTok users each that could be left with a lot of time on their hands if TikTok bans succeed.

One-fourth of creators said they go live to their followers via YouTube, making it the most popular livestreaming app ahead of TikTok (18.7%), Facebook (17.4%), and Instagram (14.0%), per an April 2023 survey by The Influencer Marketing Factory.

Meta is way ahead of competitors in US video ad spend, with 30.1% share this year compared with YouTube’s 8.3% and TikTok’s 6.5%, according to our forecast. TikTok is on YouTube’s tail as it gains share, but the short video newcomer won’t surpass YouTube before the end of our forecast period in 2025.

US connected TV (CTV) ad spend will continue to grow through 2027, when it will reach $40.90 billion, according to our forecast. Apart from a small bump next year, ad spend on TV (including broadcast and cable TV) will decline over the next few years. Still, TV’s share of total ad spend is larger than CTV’s, indicating it remains a key player in marketers’ ad strategies.

US digital ad spend growth will return to double digits next year at 11.2% growth, following 2023’s slower growth of 7.8%. Growth certainly won’t return to the 37.6% growth we saw in 2021, but it will increase steadily. Come 2025, US digital ad spend will pass $300 billion and keep climbing to nearly $400 billion by the end of 2027.

Worldwide mobile AR revenues will more than double from $18.67 billion this year to $39.81 billion in 2027, per ARtillery Intelligence. These figures encompass revenues from both consumer and enterprise applications, such as productivity software, advertising/marketing applications, consumer spending on in-app purchases and premium apps, entertainment and games development, and retail/ecommerce enablement software.

OTT video subscription revenues will hit $50.56 billion this year, an increase of 12.5% YoY, according to our forecast. Revenues will climb to $64.12 billion by the end of 2026.