TOP DIGITAL STATS FROM THE PAST WEEK:  As usual, I’d like to start off with AdWeek’s roundup of the top digital stats from the past week.  There are some decent “Did you knows?” in this week’s list.  For instance, did you know Mother’s Day is now the third biggest retail holiday in the US, with seven times more spending on Mom than Dad (stat #1)?  Did you know Friday is the highest traffic volume day for the QSR industry (stat #7)?  Did you know over half of SMBs still don’t have a company Facebook page, despite the fact that FB has over 5M unique advertisers (stat #9)?  And my personal favorite, did you know there’s now a pharma-endemic publisher called HealthiNation which claims it’s user-level data is so specific that it can charge up to $4 per completed view (stat #5).  That’s not $4 per thousand . . . we’re talking $4 per view.  And yes, the CPM on that would be $4,000.  Nice gig if you can get it!

THE STATE OF AUTO IN THE US:  There’s been a ton of chatter in the US Auto Industry about a potential flattening (and possible decline) of annual unit sales in 2017 after seven straight years of growth.  Wall Street has also created a huge disconnection between current sales/profitability and market valuation/stock price – the graph below pretty much says it all.  The attached Business Insider article is a really good dissection of the tectonic forces affecting the industry right now.  It’s particularly interesting to see how GM and Ford are navigating challenges from investors on stalled share prices, and what level annual unit sales can fall to before the domestic OEMs become unprofitable again (spoiler alert . . . they’re all safely in the black).  If you touch any of the three auto tiers this one is a must read!

MARTECH MADNESS:     Over the past week you may have seen this Lumacape pop up in your LinkedIn feed and wondered what in the hell it is.  It’s a visual representation of the entire Martech ecosystem as seen through the eyes of the editor of Chief Martech (yes, that’s a publication and a three-day conference).  Better known as the “Martech 5000”, it’s a compilation of the logos from 5,138 companies which now do business in the Martech realm, spatially organized by service(s) they provide.  What’s crazy about this chart, besides the obvious eyestrain, is the proliferation of Martech vendors. In 2014 there were just 1,000 companies on this chart.  Comparatively, from 2016 to 2017 over new 1,000 firms were added.  That tells you anyone with a proprietary algorithm and even a small amount of angel funding can set up shop as a Martech.  With so many players in the space is there any wonder why the industry is fragmented by the technical standards being overlayed across digital media, and why the publishers are constantly playing catch up on the next new tracking pixel to hit the market?  Might be an obvious statement here, but if there was ever an industry in need of consolidation Martech is it!

Have a great Monday guys!