Every minute we watch 4 million videos on Youtube, send half a million tweets and post 50,000 photos to Instagram [1]. Every second, Google processes 40,000 searches [2]. The global datasphere is growing from 33 zettabytes (one ZB is a trillion GBs) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025 [3]. This is an avalanche of new people, new devices, new means of commerce, and (of course) new ways of advertising.

By 2025 we’ll have 5.9 billion mobile subscribers, with mobile service reaching 71% of the world’s population. Europe and North America will be saturated with 80% of the population [4] enjoying mobile access. U.S. adults already spend an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes each day on mobile devices in 2018, and this will continue to grow [5]. That’s why mobile ad spend hit $76 billion in 2018, more than TV, and by 2022, mobile ad spending will be nearly half of all ad spend: $141 billion [6].

Meanwhile, the WWW continues to grow, however people access it: desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. 4.39 billion people access the web today, up almost 400 million from 2018 [7]. Internet users are increasing at a rate of 11/second, and 52% of them are primarily mobile.

Global shipments of wearable devices — smart watches, wristbands, clothing — reached 125.3 million in 2018. That’ll jump to 189.9 million in 2022 [8]. At the same time, the number of IoT connections will increase more than threefold, reaching 25 billion in 2025 [9]. Each of these smart devices is another node in the network — and another step in a customer journey.

We’re watching video everywhere now, but we still love the big screen. At times, Netflix sucks up 15% of total global internet traffic [10]. 70% of TVs shipped in 2018 are smart TVs with apps, app stores, and voice assistants [11] — and in many cases ad tracking — and most of them run Android, Tizen, or WebOS. And while people now spend more time on the Internet than watching TV, it’s still almost three hours a day on average globally [12].

AR went mainstream with Pokemon Go. Now we have augmented reality filters in Facebook and Instagram. And every day, Snapchatters spend over 500 years with Snap’s AR camera [13]. Total XR revenues will grow from $3.7 billion in 2017 to $56 billion in 2022 [14], and all of it represents engagement, interaction, and opportunity for connection.

Google, Amazon, and others sold 86 million smart speakers in 2018 [15], and billions of phones and tablets give voice-first AI assistants virtually complete penetration in most nations. Meanwhile, the number of Alexa skills doubled last year, and now sits at over 70,000 [16], allowing you to activate everything from your car to your toaster to your TV with just your voice.

The complexity of modern marketing almost can’t be compared to pre-digital. From newspaper, radio, TV, mail, and outdoor, marketers have added dozens of digital channels: social, search, email, push messaging, in-app, video, web, influencer, content, display … and the list goes on.

More channels and more tools equals more data. As the global datasphere grows to 175 zettabytes by 2025, more and more of that has become addressable by marketers.

Organic marketing data such as social signals, mobile app usage, web traffic, email opens, and more joins paid marketing signals such as impressions, engagements, and conversions. Increasingly, marketers are getting location data from mobile devices and biometric data from wearable devices. Plus, enriched personal data from first-party sources such as account and purchase history is added to third-party demographic, habit, and consumer information.