Let’s see what this week’s numbers say about online advertising, shall we?

• According to eMarketer, retail will account for over a quarter (28.7%) of all US digital ad spending in 2024. By 2027, it will also account for over a quarter of the sell-side market through its RMNs. Also, worldwide retail media ad spending is on track to increase by nearly $100 billion between 2020 and 2025. Its 21.8% rise this year will outpace growth rates in nearly all other forms of ad spending.
• American adults aren’t feeling as good as they did a few years ago, according to a report from YouGov. The report compared American’s attitudes to ads in late December 2023 with their attitudes in late December 2019. The results show that 46% of adults recently agreed that advertising helps them choose what they buy, down slightly from 49% in December 2019. Along with that, there’s been a small rise in the share who agreed that they think ads are a waste of time (53%, up from 48%) and that they don’t trust the ads on TV (52%, up from 49%).
• Google launched a private program for a handful of independent publishers last month, providing the news organizations with beta access to an unreleased generative artificial intelligence platform in exchange for receiving analytics and feedback, according to documents seen by ADWEEK. As part of the agreement, the publishers are expected to use the suite of tools to produce a fixed volume of content for 12 months. In return, the news outlets receive a monthly stipend amounting to a five-figure sum annually, as well as the means to produce content relevant to their readership at no cost. The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.