5 killer stats to start your week

1. Marketers shift spend to digital

Marketers have revised their digital ad budgets up by the greatest extent in almost a decade as they shift priority to more activation-based marketing.

That growth helped drive up overall marketing budgets and means the majority of marketers have been increasing their budgets for almost five continuous years.

Source: IPA Bellwether

2. UK inflation unexpectedly slows

The UK’s inflation rate unexpectedly dropped to 2.6% in June, down from 2.9% in May. It is the first fall since October and was largely down to lower petrol and diesel prices.

Rising inflation has been having a dramatic impact on the cost of living and the amount of disposable income consumers have. The drop also makes an interest rate raise in the autumn less likely.

Source: ONS

3. Ads are more likely to get noticed on news brand websites

Consumers are 80% more likely to view ads on the websites of news brands compared to non-news brand websites.

Ads are also noticed sooner and looked at for longer. Within 10 seconds, 25% of people will notice an ad on a news brand versus 13% for other sites and they will look at that ad for 1 second, compared to 0.7 seconds.

Source: Newsworks and Lumen

4. Copycat brands demanding attention

Copycat brands are having a big impact on visual search, decision-making and product recall. In a scenario where only a brand was present with no lookalikes, it took shoppers 3.55 seconds to locate a brand. But if both the copycat and original brand were there, people identified the imposter brand within 2.67 seconds.

Plus, when the original brand was present, people failed to identify the product 25% of the time, regardless of whether the copycat was on the shelf or not. But the error rate was much higher at 41% if the copycat appeared without the original.

Source: Warc

5. The growth of mobile phone usage

Two-thirds of the world’s population, or more than 5.5 billion people, will be using mobile devices by 2022, with 3.8 billion of those using smartphones.

Globally, Android will account for 73% of smartphone market share, followed by Apple on 21% and Windows on 4%. Some 433 million will still be using feature phones in five years’ time.

Source: Forrester