The 5 key Digital and CTV Trends to watch in 2021: Comscore

The disruptions caused by COVID-19 have prompted people to re-engineer the way they work, socialise, and organise themselves. Societal and individual priorities are being reviewed and rethought, from the ground up. The long-term consequences of all this won’t be known for some time, but it is unlikely that things will fully revert to the way they were in pre-pandemic days.

Societal changes due to the pandemic are creating new challenges for brands seeking to anticipate and capitalise on emerging consumer behaviours. Comscore’s report, titled ‘Digital and CTV Trends to Watch in 2021’, sets out to quantify some of the trends that have played out in 2020, while assessing their implications for 2021, and beyond.

As expected, the global pandemic caused a shift in the consumption of media with consumers across the world spending more time online. However, the ability of brands and advertisers to quickly capitalise on this ultra-engaged audience was restricted as advertising budgets were cut in the midst of the economic uncertainty. In this report, we aim to clarify the scale and direction of consumer behavioural changes in order to help advertisers calibrate their plans.

3 Key Takeaways:

Connected TV is lowering the barriers to cross-media marketing. Connected TV (or CTV) brings the flexibility of digital advertising to linear TV, and its fast-growing share of households is only adding to its relevance. The data in this report shows that marketers are becoming increasingly adept at adjusting their ad spend on the fly across CTV and other digital channels, depending on evolving economic conditions.

Time frames are getting shorter. Much, much shorter. 2020 has shown how quickly everything can change. Our data shows that companies that are well positioned when the winds turn can climb to the top in a matter of weeks. Knowing exactly what the future will hold is, of course, impossible. Therefore, the emphasis lies on building the ability to continuously experiment, measure, learn and iterate.

Usage of the different technology platforms is increasingly specialised. The data reveals how a narrow range of activities capture most of the time spent on any given platform. In short, desktop is for work and mobile for relaxing. As context can be more easily inferred based on device type, campaigns can be adapted based not just on audience profile, but also by context, as determined by the platform.

Trend 1: Towards Always-on Societies

Much has been said about the world moving online as a result of the pandemic. But to what extent is it true? To gauge this, we compared the proportion of adults who went online in September 2020 with the proportion in September 2019. The results are summarised in table 1; where several observations can be made.

The first observation is that in almost all countries the percentage of adults who went online (i.e., the digital population) went up. Remarkably, this holds true regardless of the level of penetration of digital services prior to the pandemic. Secondly, in 17 out of 26 of the countries listed below, that percentage of adult online stands at 75% or above. In other words, in two-thirds of the countries analysed, over three quarters of the adult population went online in September 2020, which is considerable.

A third observation is that, in terms of growth potential, India stands out. It has a huge number of inhabitants, and plenty of room to grow its digital population. A consequence of its size is that it will almost certainly shape the future of technology, globally; partly because it is too big to ignore for global companies and partly because it has a potent mix of talent and entrepreneurial nous to become the source of innovation and new business models that will shape the future. The recent trickle of announcements of investments by technology behemoths such as Google , Amazon , Facebook, Intel, and Qualcomm  in the country, often partnering with local companies such as Reliance Jio or Bharti Airtel are best understood within that context.

Last but not least, and despite its already high level, our final observation is that it is clear that digitisation is far from complete, regardless of the region. Digitisation correlates with urbanisation, which is still ongoing. (Countries with high levels of urbanisation, such as Singapore and Hong Kong have among the highest levels of internet activity.) More importantly, technology upgrades (such as 5G) and infrastructure investments – current and future – are set to change not just the numbers, but also how deeply people are connected.

Trend 2: Covid + 5G = New Behaviours… And New Business Models

Throughout 2020 a growing number of smartphone manufacturers and telecom operators made headlines with the launch of 5G-enabled products and services. This upgrade, which comes a decade after the launch of the first 4G services, holds the promise of bandwidth and speeds on wireless networks that compete with cable Internet. Of course, consumers have not waited for 5G-enabled technology before turning their mobile devices into their preferred gateway to the internet.

As the table below shows for select markets, consumers are already spending most of their time online on mobile devices. In some cases – most notably India and Indonesia – consumers have practically skipped the traditional means of accessing the internet (i.e. through desktop devices) and gone straight to mobile computing – a process referred to as ‘mobile leapfrogging’. This is extremely important for advertisers – as the assumptions and lessons learned in one region cannot be applied whole scale in another.

To fully appreciate the impact of 5G, it helps to remember that the decade following the rollout of 4G services saw the emergence of mobile-first businesses that have reshaped entire industries – think Uber, Deliveroo, and other ‘gig economy’ apps. In contrast, 5G technology arrives just as remote working, video conferencing, and digital collaboration and entertainment have become core parts of our lives.

Moreover, the share of appliances with wireless capabilities (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or NFC) keeps growing; and, around the world, ambitious initiatives that touch on all aspects of our lives - from self-driving cars to smart cities – are gathering pace. For brands and advertisers then, the implication is that they must continuously scan for emerging consumer behaviours, and then experiment and re-evaluate their assumptions.

Trend 3: Work on Desktop, Relax on Mobile

One of the most important themes of 2020 is without doubt the work-from-home regime introduced for a large proportion of the world’s white-collar workers. We see this reflected in the data, which is summarised in the table below. On desktop devices, the share of time spent on websites or apps that fall in the ‘Services’ or ‘Corporate Presence’ categories have gone up and capture most of the time spent on these devices. (‘Services’ sites include email services such as Outlook, cloud storage services such as Dropbox, and various corporate services such as WebEx, DocuSign, or Zendesk. Sites in the ‘Corporate Presence’ category provide corporate information.) In short, desktop devices are now work tools first and foremost.

The flip side of more time working from home on desktop devices is that consumers are using their mobile devices as the go-to place to socialise and relax. Most of the time spent on mobile devices is now related to Social Media and Entertainment activity. Also, the weight of these two categories has grown further, at the expense of almost every other category.

To engage consumers, this both simplifies things and magnifies some of the well-known challenges. On the one hand, context can now be more easily deduced based on device type. On the other, it is harder to control the digital experience end-to-end, since typically a handful of mobile apps act as the gateway to the digital world. More importantly, the importance of entertainment – a category that includes content providers such as Netflix, and which is also increasingly accessed through CTV – on mobile devices brings the challenge of creating rich campaigns that span device sizes and usage. The long-debated questions of how to ensure that campaigns are optimised for a wide variety of platforms are sure to remain centre stage.

Trend 4: From Trivial to Global... in Weeks

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting aspects of the pandemic is how fast events unravelled. Societies and individual lives were turned upside down in a matter of days and weeks. Something similar occurred online. On desktop devices, Zoom’s teleconferencing tools became the default application for many families keeping in contact, as well as being rapidly adopted in the work environment – becoming so ubiquitous that the company name is now at the centre of new vocabulary (for example, zoombombing, zoom fatigue, and so on). On mobile devices, Bytedance-owned TikTok became the go-to application for video content creators.

While Zoom and TikTok grabbed most of the headlines, within individual countries other services and media outlets experienced a surge in audiences. The table below shows per country the entity whose audience grew the most on both desktop and mobile from September 2019 to September 2020. The results reveal a lot about the nature of consumers in the different regions. For example, in the Americas (both in North and Latin America) we see that consumers were perhaps the most inclined to adopt new tools. In Europe, however, the focus on news sites suggest a larger concern over the impact of the pandemic, which perhaps isn’t surprising given how early and how hard the region was impacted in the cycle of the pandemic. In Asia, global companies were among the biggest beneficiaries, as consumers favoured productivity tools owned by Microsoft and sites owned by Google, such as YouTube.

Of course, both Zoom and TikTok predate the pandemic by a few years. The novelty is how quickly these two companies scaled across the globe, to the point that advertisers must now consider them when planning their campaigns. Agile execution has long been a mantra echoed in boardrooms and corporate team meetings.

But the recent chain of events puts a whole new level of emphasis on it. More than ever before, the relevance of a brand hinges on its ability to identify emerging behaviour and to contribute meaningfully to those communities that embody the zeitgeist.

Trend 5: More Connected TVs... and Dynamic Ad Spending

At the end of 2019, the launch of video streaming services such as Disney+ marked a turning point in “the streaming wars”, as the competition between different streaming services is dubbed. In 2020, the pandemic added yet another chapter to the wars by increasing the importance of home entertainment even further. But there’s more: video, as a highly effective form of content, often underpins the most viral of marketing campaigns. As a result, video streaming is positioning itself as a flexible element that binds together multi-channel campaigns.

Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok provide both the flexibility to experiment and the access needed to reach vast audiences. At the same time, households are slowly replacing their traditional televisions with connected TV devices (CTVs), which include devices that enable Internet-delivered video, and are viewed on a TV. In the US, for example, the number of households using a CTV device to stream content grew by 1.3 million between September 2019 and September 2020. In the long run, high CTV penetration has the potential to simplify the process of purchasing and managing video advertising inventory that straddles platforms, at scale.

Advertisers, of course, are already getting used to balancing video advertising across channels. To see examples of how, consider the UK and Germany, two markets of relatively comparable sizes. Analysis of our CTV advertising data shows that in both cases, most of the ad spend in those countries is channelled through a handful of networks. In Germany, the top 10 networks account for 89% of ads shown on CTVs. In the UK, the top 10 networks accounts for 70% of such ads.

Also, as the chart below indicates, in both countries advertising time on CTV per household went quickly down in the early stages of the pandemic, then bounced gradually back. On the other hand, video advertising on desktop devices decreased for a longer time, and the magnitude of the decrease was more pronounced than on CTV. There are many possible reasons for this apparent decoupling of video advertising on the different platforms, not least of which is the fact that TV advertising can often involve larger budgets and longer timeframes. But it is also an indication that marketers increasingly have the tools and flexibility to roll out, manage and adapt video campaigns across platforms.

The pandemic has accelerated trends that were long in the making, such as remote working. The advent of 5G technology will almost certainly bring forward new services and behaviours that will upend entire industries. Companies that are in the right place at the right time will see their fortunes transformed almost overnight, as happened to Zoom in 2020. For brands to successfully navigate these disruptions, their emphasis should be on developing their ability to continuously experiment, learn and iterate across platforms. Evidently the marketing industry has long acknowledged that true cross-media measurement is vital to connecting the dots. With CTV blurring the lines between platforms and turning linear TV into a digital medium, marketers have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to capitalize on tomorrow’s opportunities today, guided by true cross-media insights and analytics.