9 Particularly Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From Last Week

Another week of digital marketing stats is in the books. Check out the nine that grabbed our attention: 1. Liquor goes live Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner, and we got exclusive data on a livestreaming campaign Jose Cuervo did last year for the occasion. The brand worked with the company Livestream, which offers events marketers hardware and software tools to share their happenings live online. Jose Cuervo's 45-minute Cinco de Mayo concert got 73,000 live views in real time. We'll have more on Livestream's best branded campaigns in an exclusive Tuesday morning. 2. UGC videos decline dramatically YouTube has a brand safety issue as everyone in the industry by now knows thanks to user-generated videos that sometimes contain racism, sexism and terroristic activities and appear alongside advertising. According to Channel Factory, which calls brand safety one of its disciplines, UGC videos have started to decline. The Los Angeles-based tech company can track 1.2 million channels on YouTube, and it found that 277,00 channels uploaded at least one video the week before last and totaled 3.1 billion views. Last week, Channel Factory said, only 185,000 channels uploaded at least one clip, totaling just 1.8 billion views. Channel Factory CEO Tony Chen, who pointed out that he was simply sharing his theory on the decline, said the development may be the result of YouTube cracking down on channels with bad content. "Certain channels are not being able to monetize now—certain channels are no longer able in the available [ad] inventory," Chen said. "So some creators are less incentivized to upload new content." 3. Snapchat BFFs There's supposedly a Snapchat-to-Instagram exodus happening, but girls and young women do not seem to be a major part of it, per Episode’s new data. The mobile-focused network polled 50,070 of its viewers who are mostly females between 13 and 25, of whom 69 percent said their Snapchat usage has not declined since Instagram Stories went live. 4. Spotify ads evolve Last year, Spotify rolled out its “branded moments” ad unit that allows marketers to run video ads within the music-streaming site’s most popular playlists to unlock 30 minutes of commercial-free listening. Now, marketers are starting to fine-tune their campaigns and target them by time of day. Gatorade, Bacardi, 7-Eleven and Bose have tested the ads, and research firm Interquest found that 61 percent of people polled said the Spotify ads increased their purchase intent. That’s 54 percent higher than other Spotify campaigns. Another 76 percent of people said the ads were personally relevant to them, and 52 percent reported that they increased their interest in the brands. 5. Let's be more direct, shall we? New York-based eMarketer said that in 2017, 44 percent of all programmatic advertising will be purchased via real-time bidding, or RTB, while programmatic direct will represent 56 percent of programmatic display spending. It’s the third year in a row that programmatic direct will gain on RTB, per eMarketer;. For instance, its 2016 estimates declared a 53 percent (direct)-to-47 percent (RTB) split. More specifically, for 2017, eMarketer said, 74.5 percent ($24.25 billion) of domestic digital display ads will run via private marketplaces and programmatic-direct setups. These kinds of systems usually offer higher-quality placements and should avert ad-buying problems. And it sounds like they are growing in popularity by the day. Read more about how brands are investing more in direct programmatic here. 6. Online hard selling can be annoying Kantar Media surveyed 5,213 "connected adults" in Brazil (1,097 people), China (1,067 people), France (1,000 people), the U.K. (1,035 people) and the U.S. (1,014 people) and learned that 68 percent of respondents either liked or accepted being advertised to, though 71 percent said that remarketing ads are too repetitive. Kantar's full study can be found here. 7. Pump it up State Farm is running video ads on digital screens built into the pumps at 18,000 national gas stations as part of a partnership between Gas Station TV and payment company Verifone. The screens loop through a four- to five-minute segment featuring content from ESPN, CNN and Bloomberg that run alongside short national and local commercials. Each station’s screens can be customized to pull in either local or national content. Read more about the campaign here. 8. Mary Jane's effect Since recreational weed became legal in Oregon last year, Foursquare found that visits to liquor stores are actually up from 5 percent to 10 percent depending on the month. More on the study can be found here. 9. Cash influx for question-and-answer platform Quora just raised $85 million in a round co-led by Sam Altman on behalf of Y Combinator Continuity and Collaborative Fund, according to VentureBeat, which noted that the cash comes three years after the question-and-answer social network's last round of $80 million. Quora, which claims to have 100 million monthly users, probably needs to ramp up its monetization strategy a year after it introduced advertising on its platform.