Zenith Predicts Global Ad Spend Will Grow; Amazon Unveils A Store Without A Checkout

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Forecasting The Future

Global ad spend will grow 4.4% in 2017 to reach $566 billion, according to Zenith’s ad spend forecast, released on Monday. Zenith agrees with GroupM and Magna that 2017 is the year digital will surpass TV ad spend globally. Display will grow 13% through 2019, largely thanks to programmatic, but it’s not your mother’s banner ad. As desktop steadily declines, online video and social media will be the sole engines of digital ad spend growth. Rich media formats continue to fuel growth as advertisers shift spend to mobile, which grew 48% this year.

Ready, Set…

Amazon Go, Amazon’s convenience store in Seattle, has no checkout process. Customers will enter with the Amazon Go app and be tracked via a mix of mobile sensors and cameras. Walk in, walk out, and pay automatically. Mum’s the word from Amazon aside from a video announcing the tech, so guesses about where this service may go next are just that (though it’s rumored to be considering its own brick-and-mortar empire). One foreseeable use case is to license the technology to pre-existing retailers, but would they be willing to expose individual purchase data and in-store margins to a rival? More at The Seattle Times.

Growtheries

Amazon’s incursion on the grocery market comes as CPGs struggle to figure out ecommerce. A holiday website selling Oreo gift tins will mark the first time Mondelez manages all the supply chain and shipping logistics following the sale. General Mills abandoned a subscription snack service last year after working on it for 18 months, and Kellogg partnered with IBM on a site that sells custom granola directly to (dubious?) consumers. “It’s expensive to lure online customers with marketing, and most shoppers don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find the items they buy on Amazon or at a grocery store,” Bloomberg reports. More.

Watchacallit

At the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York on Monday, David Poltrack, chief research officer at CBS, made the case that long-form digital video should be bucketed under TV spend, rather than digital. “Long-form video is a hybrid media extension that belongs as much in the ‘television’ sector as it does in the ‘digital’ sector,” he said. “The dynamics of this unique hybrid media form are much further removed from the dynamics of digital search than they are from the dynamics of the CBS Television Network or of Showtime.” Given that long-form digital video will grow 40% next year while the rest of the digital sector grows 11%, you can see why he’d want to make that argument. More at Ad Age.

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