Ad blocking, Instagram, CXOs: 5 killer stats to start your week

Ad blocking reaches new high

In the fourth quarter of 2019, 764 million people used an ad blocker on a desktop or mobile device, double the levels at the start of 2015.

That means of the 4.1 billion people on the internet, 18.5% use an ad blocker.

Nearly twice as many block ads on mobile (527 million) and on desktop (236 million). While mobile ad blocking is up 70.5% since Q1 2017, on desktops it has fallen 16.3%.

Source: PageFair

Instagram’s brand audience overtakes Facebook’s

Instagram had a larger audience than parent company Facebook among the top 50 brand profiles globally in the final quarter of 2019.

Instagram recorded 3.57 billion impressions, compared to 3.47 billion for Facebook. In the previous quarter, Instagram had 3.42 billion compared to Facebook’s 3.46 billion.

Meanwhile, the proportion of ad spend on Facebook and Instagram that was invested in the Facebook feed decreased to 58.3%. Instagram’s feed accounted for 20.3% and Instagram Stories 10%.

Source: Socialbakers

Chief experience and customer officers becoming more prevalent

Companies are increasingly appointing chief experience officers and chief customer officers as they take customer experience more seriously.

In 2017, 39% of companies said they did not have a chief experience officer (CXO) and 37% did not have a chief customer officer (CCO). However, in 2019 these figures dropped to 11% and 10% respectively.

A growing proportion are also senior appointments reporting straight into the CEO. Some 46% of CXOs report into the CEO, up from 30% in 2017, with this number up from 29% to 36% among CCOs.

Source: Gartner

Companies resorting to cliche when talking about diversity and inclusion

Almost nine in 10 (89%) of companies actively communicate about their diversity and inclusion efforts but nearly half (47%) are using cliches when they do.

Some 42% use basic stock imagery – such as ‘heterogeneously happy at work’ images- in photography, more than a quarter (28%) use multicolours to communicate diversity and conclusion, while 29% use stick figure drawings.

Yet 64% are not using any kind of charts or graphs to explain their data or are not using any data, while 75% of those that do just use basic pie charts.

Source: Radley Yeldar

Retail sales make stuttering start to 2020

Total retail sales increased by just 0.4% year on year in January, compared to growth of 2.2% in the same month in 2019. That brought the 12-month average to a new record low.

On a like-for-like basis, sales were flat, compared to growth of 1.8% in January 2019.

Over a three-month period, food sales were down 0.6% in total and 0.1% on a like-for-like basis. For non-food, sales fell 1.3 in total and 1.5% like-for-like.

Overall for the three months to the end of January, retail sales fell 0.8% on a like-for-like and 0.4% on a total basis.

Source: BRC-KPMG