Heavy media consumption in Canada across digital and traditional channels has led to a range of effective ad formats for brands.

BuzzFeed has created a commerce site for its lifestyle brand, Goodful, while Time has launched a platform for product recommendations and reviews. TikTok’s Pulse Premiere program offers publishers 50% of ad revenues and a brand safety guarantee.

Social media and TV are the top channels that consumer packaged goods (CPG) consumers use to find new products, but in-store still plays an important role in product discovery. Meanwhile, Amazon and Walmart are fighting to capture share of CPG product searches, though in-store consumers are more likely to turn to Google for help.

We slashed our 2023 US ad revenue estimates for almost every social platform. For Snapchat (revised down by $505.2 million), TikTok (down $649.0 million), and Twitter (down $991.0 million), the cuts are significant. For Pinterest (down $31.5 million) and Reddit (down $40.9 million), the cuts are smaller but still impactful—$40.9 million is nearly 10% of Reddit’s annual revenues.

With user penetration nearly complete and time spent starting to plateau or decline on many platforms, social networks have run out of easy paths to incremental budget among their advertisers.

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.

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.

Pending legislation may require Meta and Google to pay domestic news publishers for linking to articles. Both companies say they will block news content if it passes.

D2C brands facing the declining effectiveness of search and social ads must use new strategies outside of the traditional D2C growth playbook.

D2C ecommerce will continue to grow at above-average rates. But that growth will be driven by established brands selling directly—not digitally native brands.

The battle against TikTok took center stage at this week’s NewFronts, as Meta, Snapchat, and YouTube unveiled new ad products tied to short-form video. While none of them can compete with TikTok’s lock on the youth market or the enormous amount of time its users spend on the app, these new ad products are an attempt to bring Reels, Spotlight, and Shorts into greater parity with TikTok’s ad formats.

TikTok is going all-in on in-app purchases; Meta is focused on shoppable ads; and YouTube hopes to gain a competitive advantage through its strong creator relationships. All of this is happening as we forecast US retail social commerce sales will grow nearly 30% this year to hit $68.92 billion

Ad spending is looking shaky for many of the legacy formats across digital and traditional. New channels have arrived, however, and there are bright spots. This year could be rough, but 2024 is looking better.

Meta's major monetization of minors mishap: The FTC has proposed to bar the social giant from using children's data for their ad business.

Mobile and video formats will be key to a recovering ad market in the years ahead.

US marketers will spend over $1 billion more on influencer marketing in 2023 than they did last year, per our forecast. We lay out six tactics to maximize the impact of those dollars.

Shoppable media is gaining momentum as brands look for ways to narrow the gap between discovery and purchase. Just this month, Pinterest, NBCUniversal, Meta, and Yahoo announced shoppable media updates. From AI to QR codes, we dive deeper into these developments and why they may give companies an edge.

Reels and Shorts are gaining users and adding ad options. They still lag TikTok in several key areas, but now is the time for video advertisers to give them another look.