Sports

US retail e-commerce spending grew by 13% year-over-year to reach $50.2 billion, estimates comScore in newly-released data. That makes Q1 only the second quarter to exceed the $50 billion threshold, after Q4 ended with an estimated $56.8 billion in spending. While the 13% rise in Q1 represented the 14th consecutive quarter of growth and 10th consecutive quarter of double-digit increases, it was slightly below 2012's growth rate of 15%. But, e-commerce spending accounted for 10.6% of discretionary spending in Q1, its highest share yet. Read more »

The US advertising market is quite heavily affected by political spending and the Olympics (P&O), with TV particularly influenced by cyclical P&O spending, according to [download page] the latest forecast from MAGNA GLOBAL. The researcher estimates that ad spending on core media will inch forward by 0.4% this year, but that growth is a more robust 2.4% when excluding P&O revenues. That disparity also means that TV revenues will decline by 2.8% this year, but otherwise be up by 1.9% when excluding the P&O impact. Next year, when P&O spending is back in play, the advertising market will rebound, growing by 5.9%, and fueled by an 8.9% expansion in TV revenues. Read more »

The ad-supported internet ecosystem contributed about 5% to US GDP in 2011, per a recent IAB report, and a new study provides another perspective regarding the internet's influence on the economy. The IBISWorld study examines annualized revenue growth over the past 10 years, coming to the conclusion that the fastest-growing US industries all share a common trait: they're all online-based. Social network game development tops the charts with an annualized growth rate of 134.4% since 2003. Read more »

Unruly has released its first in a series of quarterly reports examining trends in social video advertising. The report, which looks at video ad shares across verticals and brands in Q1, highlights an encouraging performance by FMCG brands, and a relatively lackluster showing from auto manufacturers. All told, FMCG ad campaigns generated almost 8.7 million shares during the quarter, up 78.2% from Q4 2012, and representing 25.3% of all shares. The vertical was propped up by Budweiser's "Brotherhood" Super Bowl ad, which became the second most-shared Super Bowl ad ever, with 2.4 million shares. Read more »

"Online video is quickly becoming online television," declares a new study [download page] from Ooyala, which looked at trends in multi-screen video consumption from broadcasters and entertainment networks around the world during March 2013. Among the various findings from the report, connected viewers watched live broadcast video 2.5 times longer than video on demand (VOD), while 77% of time spent watching mobile video was with content longer than 10 minutes, such as movies, sporting events, and TV shows. Read more »

An analysis by AdoTube of more than 9,500 in-stream video ad campaigns and nearly 13.5 billion impressions from across the world last year reveals that men responded more to ads than women, with a 17.6% higher click-through rate (CTR; 2.81% vs. 2.39%), an 8.4% higher engagement rate (3.11% vs. 2.87%) and a 3.3% higher completion rate (62% vs. 60%). The study also reveals that there was little gender difference in responsiveness to overlays, but that men were far more engaged with full-stream units. Read more »

DG MediaMind has released its latest report benchmarking performance metrics for several online ad types and formats across dozens of countries and verticals. The study finds that in the US, the average click-through rate (CTR) for in-stream video ads was 1.11% in 2012, up from 1.03% in the previous study (covering Q2 2011 - Q1 2012). That topped the benchmark rates for mobile banners (0.88%, inching up from 0.87%), rich media (down slightly from 0.15% to 0.14%), and standard banners (unchanged at 0.1%). Read more »

[Editor's note: This article has been updated with new research pertaining to ad performance and second-screening.] Analysis of the Super Bowl ads continues to pour in. With an average of 108.7 million viewers for the game, per Nielsen's tally, brands certainly had an opportunity to reach a huge audience. So which brands fared best? Which ads were tweeted about most? Did advertisers experience any post-game lift? This article rounds up and distills the research surrounding the performance of the Super Bowl commercials. Read more »

Mobile rich media ads have cited for their benefits by Opera Advertising, Celtra, and MediaMind, but a new report from MoPub [download page] questions their efficacy during Q4 2012, finding that rich media ad units on its real-time bidding exchange received higher eCPMs throughout the quarter, but did not always get correspondingly higher click-through rates. For example, in December, while rich media units received 40% higher eCPMs than non-rich media units ($1.16 vs. $0.83), their average click-through rate was only 18% higher (1.3% vs. 1.1%). Read more »

Total global corporate spending on sponsorships is slated to increase by 4.2% this year to $53.3 billion, forecasts IEG in a new report. That represents a slowdown from 5.1% year-over-year growth in 2012 and 2011. Still, in North America, the outlook for 2013 is optimistic, with spending predicted to grow by 5.5% to $19.9 billion, after more muted growth (4.4%) last year. In North America, sports will continue to capture the lion's share of spending, at 69% share of all sponsorship dollars. Read more »