LONDON—The dominance of digital media will pass a new milestone in 2022 when worldwide social media advertising will hit $177 billion, overtaking television at $174 billion, according to Zenith’s new Advertising Expenditure Forecasts report. 

Zenith is also predicting that the social media ad spend will rise to $225 billion by 2024, when it will account for 26.5% of all advertising, followed by paid search at 22.5% and television at 21.0%.

Online video advertising will also see rapid growth, with Zenith forecasting that the global online video ad spend will increase from $62 billion in 2021 to $91 billion in 2024, when it will be more than half the size of TV advertising for the first time. 

The linear television ad spend will rise much more modestly from $171 billion in 2022 to $178 billion in 2024, Zenith predicted. 

Overall, Zenith is predicting that the global ad market will continue its recovery from the 2020 downturn with 9.1% growth in 2022, after 15.6% growth in 2021. Then, the global ad spend will expand by 5.7% in 2023 and 7.4% in 2024, with brands looking to leverage more social media, online video, advanced TV, and ecommerce channels.

In another notable milestone, advertising across all digital channels will exceed 60% of global ad spend for the first time in 2022, reaching 61.5% of total expenditure, Zenith is predicting. The digital media share of total global advertising will continue to rise to 65.1% by 2024.

“As consumers rely ever more on digital technology to connect and entertain them, and to inspire and fulfil their purchases, advertising is playing a greater role in driving sales and brand growth,” said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith. “Over the next three years we expect the ad market to achieve its highest rate of sustained growth since 2000.”

Zenith estimates that global ad spend will reach $705 billion in 2021, up from $634 billion in 2019, and will rise to $873 billion by 2024.

The company cautioned however that the emergence of the omicron variant was not factored into this forecast and that the new COVID variant will increase the risk of more set-backs to the travel, hospitality and bricks-and-mortar retail sectors, which may in turn cause further shifts into ecommerce and digital advertising.

Zenith also noted that “the pace of digital transformation has been higher than expected, as progress towards containing COVID-19 has been slower and consumers have been wary to resume in-store shopping.

Central & Eastern Europe and the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) will be the fastest growing regions in 2022, but most new ad dollars come from the U.S., Zenith said, with the U.S. ad spend forecasted to expand by $80 billion between 2021 and 2024.

Zenith predicts social media will be the fastest-growing channel between 2021 and 2024, with an average annual growth rate of 14.8%, closely followed by online video at 14.0%. Paid search will grow by 9.8% a year, primarily driven by retailer media, and out-of-home will enjoy solid 7.4% annual growth as foot and vehicle traffic return to normal. Radio and television will grow marginally, by 2.2% and 1.4% respectively, while print declines by 4.7%.

LONDON—Video entertainment ad spending looks like it will get out of 2020 little worse for wear, according to projections from Zenith Media that see the overall market dipping just 0.2% across 10 markets. The entire ad market is expected to drop 8.7%, per Zenith.

The forecast comes from Zenith’s “Business Intelligence—Video Entertainment” report, which cites that the increased demand from consumers, increased supply of content and competition among video brands for viewers allowed the video entertainment sector to remain stable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Online video brands are leading the way, outpacing traditional TV, Zenith shares. In the U.S., online video brands increased ad budgets by 142%, compared to a 15% increase in spending by TV brands. The U.K. had similar disparity, with a 79% increase in ad spending by online video platforms while TV grew 34%. 

Zenith points out that TV broadcasters and pay-TV platforms increased spending in response to this new competition, but believes that it will be unsustainable as decline in revenues continue because of COVID-19 and structural issues. Meanwhile the online video platforms will continue to raise their budgets as they seek to build a loyal customer base.

Digital advertising has been a key area of focus for video entertainment ad spending with other options like out-of-home and cinema avenues limited or outright closed. In 2019, video entertainment ad spending for digital was 53% of its total, in 2020 that is expected to increase to 57%.

However, video entertainment is not expected to increase its ad spending tremendously over the next two years, Zenith estimates. Online video platforms are expected to have less capacity to raise budgets after heavy spending in 2020, while traditional TV will continue to be weighed down by shrinking revenues from TV advertising and pay-TV subscriptions. 

PLUS: TV Advertising Stems Losses in Q3 With Return of Sports, SMI Reports

The U.S. is one of the only markets where Zenith estimates the video entertainment ad spending will decline after 2020, saying that rising online revenues will not be able to compensate for the ongoing traditional TV’s shrinking revenues, which will result in reduced ad spending budgets. Growth is, and will be, strongest in Spain and India.

Zenith projects no growth in video entertainment ad spending in 2021 and 1.3% growth in 2022. That will still bump it up 1.2% in 2022 compared to 2019; the overall ad market will be 0.6% below 2019 levels.

For more information, visit www.zenithmedia.com.  

LONDON—People will be spending more time watching online video in 2021 according to the Online Video Forecasts 2019 report from Zenith. The report’s findings project that by 2021, the average person will spend 100 minutes a day watching online video.

Online video is most popular in China and Sweden, with the average person watching 103 minutes of online video daily in 2019; the only two countries where online video exceeds 100 minutes a day. However, by 2021, Zenith expects the U.S., the U.K., Canada, India and Mexico to join them.

From 2013 to 2018, the amount of time people spend watching online video around the world has grown 32% per year, according to Zenith. Contributing factors have included improvements in display sizes and quality of mobile devices, faster mobile data connections and the rise of connected TV sets.

“The consumption of online video is growing rapidly, and the average person will spend half as much time viewing online video as they spend viewing conventional television this year,” said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith. “This fast-expanding supply of audiences is fuelling rapid growth in demand from advertisers, making online video the fastest-growing digital channel by advertising expenditure.”

As a result, Zenith estimates a growth in advertising expenditure in the U.S. from $45 billion in 2019 to $61 billion by 2021, at an average rate of growth of 18%. Meanwhile, television adspend is projected to drop from $183 billion to $180 billion over the same period.

For more information on the Zenith report, visit www.zenithmedia.com.

WASHINGTON—Technologies developed by LG, its U.S. R&D lab Zenith and partner GatesAir, are included in the new ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Candidate Standard, according to LG Electronics Senior Vice President Dr. Jong Kim, who also serves as president of the Zenith R&D Lab.

“ATSC 3.0 is a collaborative effort among many broadcast technology experts. We are proud that LG technology is behind the majority of the elements of the Physical Layer transmission system. In fact, our technology is part of at least 10 of the 15 building blocks of the new Candidate Standard,” Kim said.

LG said its contributions cover the Physical Layer Candidate Standard’s scrambler, forward error correction, bit interlever, mapper, MIMO, time interleaver, OFDM framer, frequency interleaver, pilot and tone reserve and guard interval.

LG noted that ATSC 3.0 will need more capacity to deliver 4K UHD services, robust mobile reception and improved spectrum efficiency. The increased payload capacity of the physical layer, combined with HEVC encoding, will allow broadcasters more options when planning their broadcast service offerings.

Kim said LG, Zenith and GatesAir technologies in the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Candidate Standard have been successfully demonstrated in experimental broadcasts and field tests in South Korea, real-world field tests in Cleveland and Madison, Wis..

Journalists and observers were bused around Cleveland watching a Futurecast broadcast of 720p video. There was no breakup during the 30-minute bus ride on the highway and on city streets.

CLEVELAND—Work on a future ATSC 3.0 standard is moving swiftly, with officials from GatesAir, LG and Zenith’s research and development lab predicting that there will be a “candidate standard” by the end of this year. And with an experimental high-power ATSC 3.0 transmitter available for test broadcasts at any time during the day, the GatesAir/LG/Zenith Futurecast proposal shows some interesting data from recent tests in Cleveland.

Licensed as WI9X3Y in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio, and owned by WJW’s parent company Tribune Broadcasting, the full-power UHF station operates on Channel 31 with an ERP of 430 kW. This was the digital broadcasting plant for TV station WJW in Cleveland, which turned it off permanently during the analog shutdown in July 2009.

Until May 2015, when the Futurecast team consisting of GatesAir, LG and Zenith negotiated with WJM and the FCC to revive the digital broadcasting plant as a test bed for proposed ATSC 3.0 technology. Since then, the Futurecast team has conducted transmission tests of both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 for extended hours, to gain experience with the capabilities of ATSC 3.0 and compare it to the existing standard.

A previous test of Futurecast was held last October in Madison, Wisc., where three early morning hours were set aside for an ATSC 3.0 demo. The Cleveland facility allows the same team to broadcast at any time without concern for viewers or the station’s schedule. The test participants said that some things learned in the Madison tests were accommodated in Cleveland.

“In Madison, we learned a few things in terms of acquisition and tweaked that for this test,” said Wayne Luplow, vice president of Zenith’s R&D lab.

75,000 DATA POINTS

Wayne Luplow, vice president of Zenith’s R&D lab, holds a display showing Futurecast’s robust SD feed. The antenna picking up the signal is the small horizontal whip in the upper left of the photo.

To date, the Cleveland test has collected information from more than 75,000 data points. These include far more challenging conditions than those experienced in Madison, including tall downtown buildings as well as transmission near a large body of water (Lake Erie). John Taylor, vice president for public affairs and communications for LG Electronics, said that there was continual improvement since the Madison test, particularly with software for mobile acquisition and improved multipath performance.

Some of the important findings so far have compared the Futurecast ATSC 3.0 technology with the current ATSC 1.0 A/153 mobile standard. The data collected by the Cleveland team shows that Futurecast’s semi-robust HD stream (720p) is only a bit less robust than the A/153 mobile standard: Futurecast can get a solid HD signal through about 78 percent of the time, while A/153 scores about 83 percent but with much lower-quality video. Futurecast’s most robust mode scores a solid reception score of 91 percent, and that is with a clean DVD-quality SD video feed. The current ATSC A/153 mobile system has a video feed that is sub-SD in quality. The modulation and encoding are such that the most robust Futurecast signal can be received even if noise exceeds the signal level by 1.2 dB.

Pete Socket with WRAL-TV leads a presentation on AWARN, the emergency warning system built into the Futurecast proposal.

The Futurecast ATSC 3.0 proposal uses OFDM modulation and HEVC encoding. The modulation scheme means that a 6 MHz broadcast channel can carry about 26 Mbps of data, while HEVC encoding—sometimes referred to as MPEG-5—means that video streams have considerably more efficient encoding than the MPEG-2 encoding used for ATSC 1.0.

As in Madison, the Futurecast broadcast consisted of three simultaneous streams: 256QAM at 15.7 Mbps for a 4K stream, 16QAM at 1.25 Mbps for the semi-robust 720p stream and QPSK at 0.59 Mbps for the ultra-robust 480p signal.

SWEEPING OUT THE COBWEBS

Prepping WJM’s old digital transmitter for around-the-clock Futurecast testing took more than just sweeping out the cobwebs from a facility that hadn’t been used in six years. The transmitter—which is not a GatesAir/Harris product—needed two of its three IOT tubes replaced. Even with tube replacement and other re-commissioning work, the transmitter can be finicky.

“When you turn it off for a couple of weeks, it’s like starting from scratch,” said Tribune Broadcasting’s director of engineering operations Bill VanDuynhoven. “We’re still working on it.”

From left to right: Bud Bush of WQHS, TR Stoner of Univision/Cincinnati and Dave Benco of GatesAir examine a 4K Futurecast broadcast.

In addition to a look at some of the data from Futurecast’s tests, the Cleveland presentation included a discussion of an advanced early warning system called AWARN that is incorporated into the ATSC 3.0 proposal. With AWARN, far more than just an emergency announcement crawl can be transmitted. The warning information can include maps, detailed full-motion video weather reports and other emergency information, even as the main broadcast continues uninterrupted.

Another tantalizing possibility with Futurecast and AWARN is a “wake-up bit” that can turn a TV on or switch it to emergency information in the event of an imminent disaster. This is still being worked out, but the goal is to target warnings by geography, so that TVs located 25 miles east of a transmitter aren’t affected by an emergency event 25 miles west of the transmitter.

Turnout for the Cleveland event—part of which was held at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—was excellent, with more than 60 attendees. Many of them were engineers from TV stations in or near Cleveland, and it was the first time many of them had seen an over-the-air 4K broadcast.

Looking at the off-air signal on a 4K display, it didn’t take long for some to see the possibility in 4K broadcasts.

“The video encoding [in the Futurecast broadcast] is so much better than what we have,” said Karl Lahm, an engineer with a Univision broadcaster in Cleveland.

Other than a new encoder/modulator, Futurecast is designed to work with current digital transmitters and all existing passive RF gear, such as antennas and mask filters. The only other change to the transmitter is to reduce its power slightly (by 0.5 dB or so) due to the higher peak-to-average ratio of Futurecast’s modulation.