Every year, Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker gets on stage and walks through some fascinating indicators of both human behavior and economic trajectories for the year to come. These reports typically dive into Mobile Usage, eCommerce, Internet Adoption, Media Usage, Job Safety, etc. It’s a 249 page report that takes a while to get through, but it’s well worth it. Get the full report here

Digital Advertising is about getting harder

Digital Ad Spend is going up with more and more players getting into the mix – and so more clients are asking for LifeTime Value of customers as a performance metric instead of Clickthrough Rates or worse… Impressions. A great sign of things to come in the future.

Amazon now owns the online shopping journey

The product seeking consumer journey has dramatically moved from Google to Amazon. Audiences expect platforms like Amazon to already know what they want, and they’re relying less on search engines and more on AI driven product discovery.

Social Media Drives Sales

Social Media is the number one driver of online product sales (after you’ve already performed product discovery) – Retarget all the things!!!

Digital Healthcare Spending Is Up

While spending on transportation, hotels and food are dropping as the Ubers, AirBnBs and HelloFresh’s of the world are emerging, spending on Healthcare is on the rise as we become more invested in self-care (or stratification as healthcare nerds call it). This shift is driving more spending by healthcare companies on everything from better retail experiences to AI bots and beyond.
With the need for better selves, experiences, etc. – the need for data collection continues to grow at an exponential rate. With the availability of said data, the expectations from consumers of brands for experiences will continue to grow.

The same takeaway as 2017

Those without data today are poised to fail tomorrow.
On this overall note – if you’re digging this kind of data, you should also have a look at this year’s IAB report on “The Rise of the 21st Century Brand Economy”. This report does a fantastic job of describing the current world we operate in, and how we live between two very different types of marketing. Modern, and dated: The Rise of the 21st Century Brand Economy - IAB