Over 40% of direct marketers are concerned about declining response rates and budget constraints relating to printing, paper, and postage, according to Quad’s Direct Marketing Revolution 2023 report. And 32% are struggling to provide relevant, personalized, and customized messaging for consumers.

Established brands are beating digital natives at their own D2C game. As marketplace and wholesale opportunities obfuscate what it means to sell D2C, brands need to keep up with both their retail and marketing playbooks—or risk falling behind.

This year, 64% of consumers worldwide—or as many as 1.70 billion digital buyers of the 2.65 billion we forecast—will regularly buy directly from a brand, up 15 percentage points from 2019.

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce growth has slowed since 2020, but the leading digitally native brands remain popular. In December 2021, the Peloton website raked in 6.7 million visits worldwide, far more than the sites of Warby Parker, Casper, and other top digital natives in the D2C space.

Building breakthrough brands with staying power in the digital age will combine the best aspects of traditional mass-market branding and a modern growth-hacking mindset. Established brands and digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs) must be willing to learn from one another.

Programmatic buys will account for 86.0% of spending on digital display ads in France this year, or €1.69 billion ($1.99 billion). Double-digit annual growth will boost spending to €2.29 billion ($2.70 billion) in 2021.

eMarketer forecasting director Shelleen Shum discusses our estimates for US spending on programmatic direct ads and the factors driving growth.