Almost three-fourths (71 percent) of marketers said evaluating the effectiveness of digital media investment has become more difficult in recent years, particularly in India and China, according to programmatic media platform Xaxis. In addition, 86 percent of marketers plan in the next one to two years to boost spending on “outcome-driven media,” which describes advertising whose effects can be precisely tracked by measurements such as cost per in-target reach, in-store footfall, cost per incremental site visitor or cost per sale.


Source: Xaxis

Source: Xaxis

Smart-speaker shipments almost tripled (up 197%) to a record 22.7 million units globally in the third quarter from a year earlier, putting the voice-enabled devices on track to exceed 100 million in use during the final three months of 2018, according to researcher Strategy Analytics. Amazon remained the top-ranked vendor in the third quarter with a 32 percent share followed by Google at 23 percent. China’s Baidu boosted its share from just 1 percent in the second quarter to 8 percent in the third quarter, the fastest growth among smart-speaker makers. Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi are vying leadership in the fledgling smart speaker market in China.