This week in marketing news, we see how TV consumption has evolved, marketers turn to social media for their digital video needs and—holy Samsung, Batman—that’s a whole lot of VR headsets.

Eyeballs And Esports

Are you ready for VR? Samsung sure is. According to analyst firm SuperData, Samsung’s Gear VR headset was the most shipped VR headset in the first quarter of 2017, selling 782,000 units. Coming in a distant second is the PlayStation VR (375,000) followed by Google Daydream (170,000), HTC Vive (95,000) and Oculus Rift (64,000).

China now accounts for 57 percent of the world’s consumption of esports videos, according to research from IHS Markit. Esports is expected to become a $1 billion advertising industry by 2021, with video driving the lion’s share of revenues along with influencer marketing and sponsorship. Last year, advertising in esports totaled around $280 million globally, IHS reported. The number of video streams delivered in China totaled 11.1 billion in 2016, with the second largest market—North America—providing 2.7 billion video streams.

Trends To Watch

Consumers love their video content, regardless of what device they’re played on. Case in point—the watch time of TV channels on YouTube has increased 50 percent in the last year, YouTube revealed during its Newfronts presentation. In addition, watch time of YouTube content on TV screens has doubled year-over-year.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau released a new study on TV consumption trends in the US. The Changing TV Experience: 2017 revealed that 56 percent of US adults own a streaming-enabled TV—a 56 percent rise from just two years ago. Of those streaming-enabled TV owners, half say they prefer watching commercials over having to pay for ad-free subscriptions when streaming video on TV, up 14 percent over 2015. Forty-four percent said that commercials during digital video are less intrusive than those during traditional linear programming.

Short-form pre-roll ads may see some investment in the next few months, but not so much for livestreaming. According to April research by Trusted Media Brands, of the US agency and marketing professionals polled who are involved in digital or mobile advertising and who place digital video pre-roll ad campaigns, 58 percent said they “definitely will” use short-form pre-roll in the next six months. More than a quarter (28 percent) of respondents said they “definitely will” invest in live stream formats in the next six months, but almost as many (27 percent) said they “definitely will not.”

Socially Reliable

Sixty-eight percent of marketers believe social platforms are the most important partners for digital video campaigns, according to a new study by Advertiser Perceptions on behalf of Trusted Media Brands. According to respondents, 59 percent give social media the highest marks for delivering on engagement, ROI (39 percent) and customer service (38 percent). Advertisers plan to allocate 28 percent of their overall budgets to digital video, a three percent increase from last June.

PR, Please

We’ve all seen a few brands (who shall remain nameless) who could definitely use some good PR right about now, but companies are investing more on internal PR than external, one report shows. Findings by the Association of National Advertisers and the USC Center for Public Relations at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism revealed that 62 percent of respondents plan to increase internal public relations staffing over the next five years.

Twenty-five percent said they planned to increase overall spending on PR over the next five years and a full 75 percent said they planned to do the same over the current year.