This week in marketing statistics, online video views are up, US homes get “smart” and Tekken 7 kicks the competition.
Video On The Go
Mobile devices will lift online video viewing by 20 percent this year, Zenith predicts. By 2019, Zenith predicts that 72 percent of all online viewing will occur on mobile devices.
So how long should marketers edit their online videos? At least 15 minutes, according to video marketing automation platform TwentyThree. The company studied over 1.5 million videos to better inform marketing and content creation teams about preconceived video myths and found that while 80 percent of videos are under five minutes, they drive less than a third of overall video engagement. Mid-form and long-form videos, which are at least 15 minutes long, drive over half of all video engagement despite encompassing just eight percent of all video in the study.
TV Isn’t Dead
Online advertising has already overtaken TV advertising in size, according to the Price Waterhouse’s (PwC) annual Entertainment & Media Outlook report. PwC says that the online advertising market outpaced TV in 2016 by roughly $15 billion, and it will be a $116 billion market by the end of 2021.
Marketers aren’t giving up on TV just yet, according to research firm Media Dynamics. This year’s Upfronts set a new record with orders for $19.7 billion worth of prime-time commercial spots on cable and broadcast TV networks, an increase of 5.9 percent over last year.
Shopping Savvy
Fifty-seven percent of surveyed consumers across generational groups say social media influences their shopping decisions, according to a Yes Lifecycle Marketing report titles “A Marketer’s Guide to Reaching the Generations.” Of all the social media platforms, Facebook is a strong influence with 44 percent of consumers across the Gen Z, millennial, Gen X and baby boomer age brackets.
Gen Z is now the single largest audience segment at 26 percent, according to Nielsen’s new Total Audience report. Millennials and Gen-Z now comprise 48 percent of the total media audience.
Influencer marketing may be one reason social media is so . . . well, influential with consumers, but they’re not willing to believe everything they see. According to Izea’s State of the Creator Economy report, 32 percent of consumers can tell if the influencer or source of the sponsored post has actually tried or used the product based on the content itself. In addition, 28 percent of consumers judge an influencer marketing post based on its relevance to the influencer’s brand and previous product endorsements.
Regardless of their reasons for shopping, consumers are doing less of it offline, according to the US Commerce Department. Retail sales unexpectedly dropped for a second month in June, Commerce Department data showed. In addition, purchases dropped 0.2 percent despite a forecast of 0.1 percent gain.
Despite shopping more online, technology can be a strong enabler of emotional connection when leveraged appropriately, according to Forrester Research. Live-person sales and self-service kiosks both elicited a 60 percent positive interaction, Forrester found. The report examines digital experiences ranging from automated self-checkouts to onsite messengers and video chats.
Tech Love
Consumer enthusiasm for technology is driving the US consumer technology industry to an estimated 3.2 percent revenue growth in 2017, according to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Both emerging technology and mature categories are exceeding expectations, CTA found, earning $321 billion in retail revenues ($251 billion wholesale).
By 2021, 55 percent of all homes in North America are expected to be smart homes, according to a new forecast study by Berg Insight. The company found that in North America, more than 31 million smart home systems were in use last year. Of those systems, 26 million were individual solutions for a single function and five million were whole-home systems.
Gamers should love this one—the global heads up display (HUD) market size is expected to reach $13.5 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research. While video game enthusiasts are used to such displays on-screen, adding HUDs to real-life objects (especially vehicles) is on the rise. Demand for HUD systems demand will reach 34.87 million units by the year 2025, Grand View Research predicts.
Gaming Galore
Video game software and hardware combined could reach $200 billion by 2021, according to Digi-Capital’s new “Games Report and Database Q3 2017.” That’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.9 percent for the next five years.
In the meantime, total video game spending in June (including hardware, software and accessories) increased seven percent versus a year ago to $765 million, NPD reported. Accessories like controllers and game cards were the only category to see a decline in spending last month.
Hardware spending grew 27 percent over June 2016, to $231 million in June, with the PlayStation 4 as the best-selling hardware platform. Thanks to the Nintendo Switch, hardware spending has grown 19 percent year to date to $1.4 billion.
Portable products spending for the likes of PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS continue to decline, however. Year-to-date spending on portable hardware has fallen 40 percent.
NPD’s Top-Selling 10 Games For June 2017 (Across All Platforms):
- Tekken 7
- Injustice 2
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy
- ARMS*
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Mario Kart 8
- Overwatch*
- NBA 2K17
- Horizon Zero Dawn
* does not include digital downloads other than full downloads on Steam
