Last year, marketers' priorities included navigating a rising connected TV (CTV) landscape, using AI to optimize budgets, and questioning whether traditional measurement strategies like last-click attribution could use improvement.

For brands, working with influencers was once an experimental addition to their media plans, but growth in influencer marketing spend is now outpacing its digital and social counterparts, per our forecast. While influencer partnerships still account for a significantly smaller part of the media mix, their growth is a sign that the industry is maturing—and more legacy advertisers want in.

On today’s podcast episode, we discuss which group of folks ChatGPT will affect the most next year, a social media ban for young people in Australia, how the “snippet generation” are influencing our world, what to make of this new group of “subscription pausers,” movie theatre etiquette around throwing popcorn, and more. Tune in to the discussion with Senior Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson, Senior Analysts Ross Benes and Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, and Vice President of Content Paul Verna.

Affiliate marketing is now a $10 billion industry, and marketers recognize its effectiveness. Yet many aren’t prioritizing affiliate marketing spend, due to difficulty with attribution or classifying it as social media spend. Here are five charts demonstrating the state of affiliate marketing.

On today's podcast episode, we discuss when we might be approaching the consequential ceiling of “peak media”, which folks watch the most influencer videos, where smartphone time is still climbing, and entirely too much more. Tune in to the discussion with our Principal Analyst and host Bill Fisher, Principal Analyst Paul Briggs, Vice President of Research Jennifer Pearson, and Chief Research Officer at GWI Jason Mander.

Influencer marketing is a core part of many brands’ strategies. Sponsored content spend on social media will total $8.14 billion in 2024, nearing the $10 billion mark by 2026, according to EMARKETER’s March 2024 forecast.

Reach is the most popular metric for measuring the success of influencer marketing programs among US enterprise marketers, per a Linqia study.

“Affiliate, to my mind, is one of the most under-discussed and underappreciated spending areas in media and advertising,” our analyst Max Willens said on a recent EMARKETER webinar. US affiliate marketing spend will reach $10.72 billion this year and drive $307.27 billion in ecommerce, per our forecast. Driving that spend is a persistently value-conscious consumer, a growing creator economy, and a pivot to publishers with first-party data. Here are five factors contributing to affiliate marketing’s success.

Three themes echoed throughout Advertising Week New York this year: Third-party data is harder to get, the creator economy is growing, and marketers face more pressure to prove ROI. Here are some of the most common—and controversial—trends from the event.

Influencer marketing is a booming industry. But accessing the opportunity requires navigating a complex web of consumer preferences and platforms, and growing pressure to prove ROI.​

More than a quarter (26%) of marketers worldwide use YouTube for influencer marketing strategies, according to a September 2024 report by the Influencer Marketing Hub. Another 25% uses the platform for organic content marketing.

This year’s Olympics were a major opportunity for marketers, both on TV and connected TV (CTV) and on social media. The Games only come around every two years, but the marketing lessons are applicable long after Paris’s crowds have cleared. From a push for generative AI (genAI) to athletes becoming creators in their own rights, here are five takeaways from the Summer Olympics.

“The creator economy is at an inflection point,” our analyst Jasmine Enberg said on our “Beyond Brand Deals: How Marketers Can Navigate the New Creator Economy” webinar. “We’re at a moment now where it seems like every marketer has recognized that they need to be working with creators.”

This year, we’re in a Brat girl summer. The lime green trend used by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign joins a handful of other trends going viral this summer. Marketers may be too late to capitalize with their own content, but there are still important takeaways from these TikTok trends that advertisers can apply long after the trends become outdated.

Influencer marketing is often associated with Gen Z and millennials, and for good reason. Nearly half of both generations are more likely to trust an ad featuring an influencer they trust, according to June 2024 data from Captiv8. But 79.8% of US Gen Xers and 53.9% of US baby boomers will use social media this year, per our May 2024 forecast. To ensure marketers seize the untapped potential for reaching these generations, we’ve compiled a generation-by-generation breakdown on how and where to reach them.

Social media is crucial for B2B marketing success. However, B2B marketers’ ages may be affecting their campaigns’ effectiveness. Younger B2B marketers are leading the way in leveraging social media and data-driven strategies.

Every year, as adland descends on the south of France for Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, there are a few topics that dominate the conversation. This year’s two hottest topics—creators and AI—didn’t deviate much from 2023, but the way each showed up on the Croisette and at the Palais did.

The world’s biggest advertisers converged at Cannes Lions last week. At the festivities, marketers discussed everything from AI (it’s everywhere) to retail media (it’s growing). Other hot topics included the creator economy, which people are optimistic about, and data privacy, which has people more concerned. Here are some hot quotes overheard at Cannes.

Influencer marketing is becoming a need-to-have for payment brands’ marketing teams. While not without risks, it’s key to building awareness and creating relationships with young consumers.

“Creator is in their name. So let them create.” That was the advice Sophie Jamison, CEO of Lightning Media, shared at the recent EMARKETER Summit. Jamison warned against giving creators too much direction and was optimistic about the future of social media marketing, even if TikTok goes away.