Welcome to my blog!

I joined Forrester earlier this year as an associate forecast analyst on the ForecastView team, focusing on digital marketing (DM) topics. The ForecastView team’s goal is to answer the questions “How much?” and “When?” To this end, we publish five-year forecasts that provide forward-looking, quantitative guidance around the key issues that our research analysts are discussing as well as the important trends that Forrester’s Technographics® survey data reveals. To learn how our forecasts can help you with your investment decisions, see our ForecastView overview.

On the DM forecast team, we evaluate various facets of the digital marketing space, including online display, online video, social media, paid search, email marketing, mobile advertising, and ad tech.

Our latest report, the Forrester Readiness Index: Digital Marketing, 2016, touches on many of these areas. In it, we quantify the digital marketing readiness of 55 countries across six continents based on data collected for 23 variables — ranging from display, search, and social ad spending to per-capita online traffic and video consumption to penetration rates for PC, smartphone, internet, and broadband usage to GDP growth, number of businesses, and the percentage of businesses selling online. It provides one of the most comprehensive and digestible evaluations of the global digital marketing landscape available in one place.

One of the benefits of collecting data on so many variables is that it can reveal hidden opportunities (or pitfalls) in certain countries that a more simplistic analysis might overlook. The index shows that several countries actually have a noticeably higher or lower digital marketing readiness than their digital ad spending alone would suggest. When comparing two particular countries, for instance, we saw a 33% difference in relative positioning based on the Forrester Readiness Index than it would have been based on digital ad spending alone.

In this year’s version, we are happy to announce some refinements that will improve its usability and make it easier to draw conclusions:

  • An updated indexing method. We have updated the indexing method so that the size of an index value now more directly indicates its impact on the overall index score. As always, the relative differences in the index values continue to reflect the relative differences in the underlying data. For instance, the fact that Brazil’s search ad spending score is 3.9x higher than Belgium’s means that its actual spending on search advertising is also 3.9x as high.
  • An enhanced Readiness Matrix. The Readiness Matrix continues to plot countries’ Digital Marketing Environment Index scores (a measure of current digital marketing readiness) against their Digital Marketing Opportunity Index scores (a measure of future digital marketing potential). Now, with a new regression line that plots the typical ratio of environment to opportunity, it is easier to identify which countries have strong or weak digital marketing readiness potential relative to their current environment.

For more on the Forrester Readiness Index: Digital Marketing, 2016 and an overview of the current global digital advertising environment, tune in to my webinar Forrester Data: Understanding The Global Shift Toward Digital Advertising on Thursday, September 15 at 11:00 a.m. ET.