5 interesting stats to start your week

Nearly half of businesses plan to expand their marketing teams this year

Over two in five (41%) businesses intend to expand their internal marketing teams in 2024, despite persisting economic uncertainty.

Digital marketing agency Impression surveyed 1,000 marketing professionals and almost three-quarters (73%) of them expect their businesses to grow this year.

While expectations for growth are strong, an increase in marketing budgets is not necessarily expected in line with this. Less than half (47%) of respondents say they expect marketing budgets to increase in 2024.

Brands are also directing their efforts and budget into bottom of the funnel activity. Almost three in ten (28%) of the marketers surveyed say their business is focusing their efforts on conversion and driving sales and leads, versus 26% who report their organisation is focused on driving brand awareness and attraction.

Around 20% say customer retention and loyalty is their biggest focus, with a similar proportion (21%) saying their businesses efforts are split equally between brand building, bottom of the funnel activity and retention.

Source: Impression

Consistency between out of home and TV ads drives better effectiveness scores

Brands should aim to build consistency between their out of home (OOH) advertising and TV ads, suggests research from System1 and JCDecaux UK.

The research finds that out of home ads matching their TV counterparts perform twice as well on brand fluency, according to System1’s Test Your Ad platform, which looks at emotional responses to ads.

Out of home ads aligned with their TV equivalents score an average of 62% on two-second brand recognition, which measures the strength and speed of brand recognition, compared to 30% for OOH ads that didn’t align with TV creative.

OOH ads with TV counterparts also performed better on System1’s other measures, namely its star rating, which predicts the long-term brand

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Google Pixel Buds Professional gets an interesting new characteristic by way of its most current firmware update

In spite of remaining announced early previous year, spatial audio operation failed to debut together with Google’s personal Pixel Buds Professional. Alternatively, it initially showed up together with the OnePlus Buds Pro 2, and its implementation left a ton to be desired. However, a leak from very last month mentioned the Pixel Buds Professional would get the functionality before long. That day is lastly on us, as verified by Google’s blog post.

For the uninitiated, spatial audio tracks the position of your head relative to the earbuds and adjusts the seem accordingly. It aims to provide a theatre-like multimedia experience. People have to perform a a single-time head-monitoring set up for the feature to work. Pixel Buds Professional consumers can get advantage of spatial audio soon after putting in firmware version 4.30, which is now rolling out all over the world.

It is critical to be aware that not all smartphones, which include the Pixel A series, will assistance the element. The product wants to have Android 13 with spatial audio enabled. Google’s formal record of devices consists of the Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. Non-Pixel consumers must verify with their manufacturer for compatibility. Furthermore, spatial audio is locked powering the Opus/AAC/LDAC Bluetooth codecs and will not get the job done with Qualcomm aptX and aptX High definition.

Purchase the Google Pixel Buds Pro on Amazon

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