Five takeaways from Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trend report
Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trend Report launched recently, so Britt Boss, a market and media analyst at Isobar Netherlands, has picked out her top five takeaways.
1: We’re addicted.
Of course this comes as no surprise, but the numbers don’t lie: adults spend 5.9 hours per day on digital media. That’s 18 minutes per day longer than in the previous year! This is mainly induced by an increase in mobile usage. While our screen time is still rising, there’s also movements popping up urging society to stand up to technologies hijacking our minds. Techniques that are put in place to keep a user occupied within a platform are being criticised. According to the Time Well Spent Movement for instance, technology should be realigned with humanity’s best interests. For brands and businesses, trends like these require an even bigger focus on meaningful connections and adding something to people’s lives, instead of only taking up their time.
2: We would not trade privacy for benefits.
Yay GDPR! This chart shows that us privacy-keen Dutchies are way below the global average of willingness to share personal data for benefits. Other than in China, where 38% of citizens are willing to share personal information in exchange for lower costs, personalisation, etcetera. While China could be a very interesting market for businesses because of this, the willingness to share data also feeds the Black Mirror-like Social Credit system that is already put in place and can have serious socio-cultural implications.
3: Voice technology has taken off — for real.
While I thoroughly dislike blatant claims like “2017 was the year of voice”, 2017 might have been the year of voice after all. Machine learning has brought voice technologies to the point of human accuracy. Google Machine Learning has now evolved to a word accuracy rate of 95%. This shows that the technology is more than ready for a voice revolution. Voice is offering new ways of communication, shopping and news- and entertainment consumption which is opening up a lot of opportunities for brands and businesses.
4: The adoption of voice is seeing significant growth.
Not only technology is ready for a voice revolution, society is too. Amazon’s Alexa went from 10 million to over 30 million installed units in 2017 (USA only) and developers are building voice skills at a mad tempo. As voice assistants are still mainly focusing on the English-speaking market, penetration of voice in non-native English markets is not yet at the same level. However, it is only a matter of time before voice will also take stage in these markets and thus will also be more relevant to local businesses. For now it seems that Google’s voice assistant, carrying the utmost creative name ‘Google Assistant’, is going to beat Amazon and pioneer in the Netherlands, because rumour has it that the service will be available here later this year.
5: Social media is offering more efficient product discovery.
Personalisation in the feed is the key to driving product discovery and is in turn leading to the most effective commerce opportunities. Since technical options for targeting as well as the knowledge about the right ways to target the right audience is increasingly getting more advanced, generating leads and sales through social media is getting more and more effective. 55% of people bought a product online after they discovered it on social media. Facebook still works best for product discovery, followed by Instagram and Pinterest. Buyable pins are still only limited available to certain countries, but will most definitely see rapid adoption when rolled out to the Netherlands. Considering Pinterest is the number 6 biggest platform in the country with 3 million users, this will open up interesting new sales channels for brands.
Britt Boss, Market & Media Analyst, Isobar Netherlands
