The State of Digital

Global online media consumption set to overtake TV for the first time

As part of its series of publications forecasting global media marketplace futures, GroupM’s new The State of Digital report focuses on the impact of technology and digital capabilities on consumers and advertisers.

Offering intelligence on consumer media consumption and advertising investment trends worldwide, GroupM – WPP’s media investment management division – calculated consumers’ time spent with each media format, globally, and average time spent with media overall.

In 2018, consumers will spend an average 9.73 hours a day with media, up from 9.68 hours in 2017

For the first time, it’s predicted that time spent with online media will overtake time spent with linear TV globally. Broken down, online will have a 38% share and TV 37%, with the balance spread primarily across print and radio.

Escalating ecommerce spend (data from 35 countries revealed cumulative ecommerce transactions worth $2.105 trillion in 2017, a growth of 17% from 2016) will be further supported by the increase in time spent with online media. GroupM predicts 15% growth in 2018 to $2.442 trillion, equivalent to about 10% of all retail.

For the report, GroupM also examined programmatic ad investment trends. On average across reporting countries, 44% of online display investment was transacted programmatically in 2017 versus 31% in 2016. This will rise to 47% in 2018. For online video investment, programmatic is smaller; 22% in 2017 versus 17% in 2016 and predicted to rise to 24% this year.

Assessing the global digital landscape for 2018, GroupM looks at how blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), data, digital spend and other key trends will have an impact on marketing communications, in a world where the Google-Facebook duo will continue to be the key growth driver.

For more in-depth insight and analysis, read GroupM’s The State of Digital report