Global personal luxury sales will contract this year: That will be the first decline since the Great Recession as weak spending in China weighs on the broader market.

The beta feature simplifies music remixing for creators, signaling YouTube’s push to rival TikTok in video innovation.

Lackluster improvements in OpenAI’s Orion signal that limited training data and expensive computing could slow future breakthroughs.

Like all consumers, for high-income consumers (earning $150,000 or more a year), the physical store is the top source of discovery, according to our US High-Income Consumers’ Path to Purchase 2024 report.

Consumers are cautiously optimistic about AI use. Over 100 million people will use generative AI (genAI) in the US this year, per our June 2024 forecast. But many are still distrustful of the tech as it relates to consumer privacy, personalization, and its capacity to hallucinate. Here are five charts demonstrating how consumers really feel about AI, and what marketers can do to make them more comfortable with the evolving technology.

Ad targeting starts with finding the right people. AI has helped marketers do this for years with sophisticated clustering algorithms. These algorithms create segments of people based on certain similarities that indicate their likelihood to respond to an ad. GenAI can make it easier to build these segments on the fly.

Financial regulators will undergo major agenda shifts and changes in leadership.

Marketers are interested in exploring upper-funnel tactics while continuing to invest in lower-funnel strategies, requiring retail media networks (RMNs) to provide a combination of ad formats for a full-funnel effect. In addition, marketers want access to high-quality data for better targeting and personalization, and look to RMNs for enhanced measurement and optimization techniques.

Western Union has become the latest financial company to launch a media network, joining the likes of Chase and PayPal. “The biggest advantage [financial media networks] have is just breadth. So, unlike a retail media network, they capture the entire spending history that a customer has,” said our analyst Maria Elm on an episode of our Behind the Numbers podcast.

Both apps see user spikes in light of Trump’s win and Musk’s divisive moves, signaling an appetite for other social media models and the potential for new advertising platforms.

Amazon is on a never-ending mission to speed up delivery: The retailer’s latest initiatives, including smart glasses and streamlined grocery fulfillment, will help cut costs and encourage shoppers to order more—and more often.

Square Loans, Cash App Borrow, and Afterpay were all bright spots that should yield longer-term growth

On Holdings’s sales jumped 34% in Q3: The upstart’s efforts to boost brand awareness gave lucrative direct-to-consumer sales a lift.

AppLovin's Axon engine drives ad success: Its AI-powered product boosted software platform revenues by 66% year over year.

The tech will make it easier for consumers to choose how they pay— boosting the card’s already strong growth

Alibaba and JD.com tout Singles Day successes, but the data is murky: While transactions rose 27% YoY, the sale was 10 days longer than last year, making it an uncertain gauge of consumer sentiment.

Home Depot’s sales rose 6.6% in Q3: Those better-than-expected results stemmed from severe weather and warm temperatures in many parts of the US boosting demand.

Half of the drugs launched in the US last year underperformed: We examine why it’s critically important for drugmakers to deliver early returns on their new product launches.

Is the retail health clinic business model dead? Our forecasts project fewer consumers will visit a retail clinic such as CVS or Walgreens every year through 2026. We detail why below.

Nutritional supplements are popular in the US, but consumers don’t know how ingredients are vetted: The situation presents brand marketers with an opportunity to fill this knowledge gap and connect with shoppers.