Worldwide consumer spending on media content and technology is growing at a faster pace than global inflation and consumer price index rates.

PQ Media says there was a 7.2% gain in global average media consumer spending to $299.97 in 2016. Growth drivers include growing demand for digital media content and lower price hikes for new mobile devices.

In fact, digital media content and tech comprised nearly 70% of overall global consumer spending on all media content and tech (traditional and digital) in 2016, the researcher found.

Global inflation has been around 2.8%, according to a recent estimate from Yardeni Research -- with the consumer price index up 4.1% for “emerging” economies and up 1.8% for “advanced” economies.

The highest spending was in the U.S., where consumers spent an average of $1,289 in 2016 on all media and technology -- a 5.8% gain over 2015.

Average U.S. digital media and technology consumer spending grew 11.1% to $754.42, while traditional media spending was slightly up 0.9% to $534.11.

The lowest-spending country globally among top 20 markets was India, where consumers spent $54 per person.

Global consumer spending on digital media content and technology is rising much faster than with traditional media content and technology. Digital media spending grew 12.2% to $1.05 trillion in 2016, with traditional media content/technology up only 1.6% to $593.19 billion.

Responding to fresh 

 about its content policy, Facebook is further conceding that, yes, policing about a billion people’s daily interactions is hard.

Among other challenges, it isn’t easy to balance user safety and free expression, says Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at the social giant.

For Facebook’s thousands of human content reviewers, it’s all about “understanding context,” Bickert explains in a new blog post. “It’s hard to judge the intent behind one post, or the risk implied in another,” according to Bickert.

In some cases, content that many users find offensive might benefit the broader Facebook community.

For instance: “Experts in self-harm advised us that it can be better to leave live videos of self-harm running so that people can be alerted to help, but to take them down afterwards to prevent copycats,” Bickert explains.

Specifically, “when a girl in Georgia … attempted suicide on Facebook Live two weeks ago, her friends were able to notify police, who managed to reach her in time,” she recounts.

Other ongoing issues include distinguishing between art and pornography, and specific calls for a named individual to be harmed.

Adds Bickert: “These tensions -- between raising awareness of violence and promoting it, between freedom of expression and freedom from fear, between bearing witness to something and gawking at it -- are complicated, and there are rarely universal legal standards to provide clarity.”

Going forward, Bickert said that Facebook would continue to face criticism from people who want more censorship and people who want less.

While she welcomes the feedback, the issue is whether brand partners will exercise patience when the company tries to figure out this immense challenge.

This column was previously published in Moblog on May 23, 2017.

The summer travel season may be here, but that doesn’t mean consumers will be taking a vacation from their technology, even in the air, and even if they don’t know how much it will be costing them. 

According to a Groupon survey, the average family will spend an average of 35 days — about a third of the entire summer — using electronic devices. According to the survey of 1,000 parents, the average U.S. child will watch an estimated 60 movies and play 150 hours of video games over the summer. 

It’s not just kids who are using their devices. Parents also said they feel like they personally waste one out of every four weekends a month using their technology and spend the equivalent of nine non-working days over the summer doing their own inactivity. 

“We love technology, but we also think it should be in the service of something we love even more,” said Greg Rudin, head of Fun Things To Do at Groupon, in a statement. “As parents, we’re often just as guilty as our kids when it comes to screen time.”

Naturally, the company, which has focused on selling experiences, had some suggestions for summer activities that would encourage people to drop their electronics. Among the top five suggestions from families were: going to the beach, attending a barbecue, taking a road trip and going to a water park.

Meanwhile, Millennials, the first digital generation, have high expectations for their connected experiences when traveling. According to Gogo, which provides in-flight wifi services, half of Millennial travelers expect their connected experiences in the air to be the same as those on the ground. Indeed, connectivity is important enough to rank into the decisions. Though 90% of Millennial travelers have a preferred airline, nearly half (48%) said they would use a different carrier if WiFi was not available.

"Passengers simply expect more from in-flight connectivity today — no longer is there a distinction between enjoying movies at home, sending emails from a café or binge watching at 35,000 feet," said Alyssa Hayes, director of insights at Gogo, in a statement. 

Once on the ground, consumers expect to remain connected, no matter where they are. Recent surveys from T-Mobile and GfK found that more than two-thirds (69%) of travelers who had been abroad in the past year took their smartphone with them, and 55% said they’d rather lose their luggage than their phones. 

At the same time, nearly 60% of respondents said they had no idea what the costs were for using a smartphone outside of the country. Even among those who said they were aware of the costs, nearly 80% admitted they had underestimated the actual bill for the international charges.

“Mobile's changing everything—especially travel. And, when you're exploring new places, you shouldn't be stressing about going home to bill shock," said  T-Mobile CEO John Legere, in a statement.

Urban Airship announced a new company milestone this week, delivering its 1 trillionth push notification.

The digital growth company powers the push notifications of more than 45,000 mobile applications via its Urban Airship Engage platform, including major brands like Adidas, Alaska Airlines, NBC Universal and Zillow. Urban Airship also works with many athletic organizations, including the Cleveland Cavaliers and Sacramento Kings NBA teams, as well as the U.S. Open tournament.

“Mobile unlocks so much more context than marketers have ever been able to touch into before,” says Corey Gault, director of communications at Urban Airship. “An app used to tell you when the game was, but now apps can also tell you when you should leave your house based on the current traffic situation, can guide you to open parking spots, deliver a hot dog to your seat, and show you instant replay from 5 different angles.”

Furthermore, mobile notification engagement is on the rise, according to Urban Airship’s analysis of iOS customer data from Q1 2015–2017. App users opting in to receive push notifications have grown from 40.4% in 2015 to 43.6% in 2017, and engagement rates have also increased from 7.4% in 2015 to 9.6% in 2017.  

Urban Airship doesn’t just send push notifications to locked phone screens, either. The company also delivers in-app notifications, message center alerts, and notifications to Web site visitors and customers in other digital marketing channels like email or SMS.

“Email has been around forever, but with mobile it’s taken on a completely different experience,” says Mike Herrick, SVP of product and engineering at Urban Airship. “A lot of ESPs talk about marketing emails and transactional emails, but there are also notification emails.” 

Herrick says that email marketers can leverage the same CTA-driven design principles as push notifications to encourage readers to take action from an email message.  

“People don’t want to read an email that’s 50 paragraphs long,” says Herrick. “It’s a lot of dense content that doesn’t fit the time we’re living in. Instead, entice them with an image or have a landing page with more information.” 

Herrick says marketers need to put the user first, and that personalization is key no matter what the type of message being delivered. 

“We live in a time where you have people’s attention for just a moment,” says Herrick. “They’ll glance and, if they’re interested, tap it. Otherwise they’ll ignore it and move on. It’s all about personalization -- you give the individual the right content at the right point in time.”

Customers should also have a choice to specify the types of messages they would like to receive.

“Breaking news is often not that uplifting, but people still want to be informed,” says Herrick. “Instead of getting breaking news for everything, maybe you don’t want to read about politics.”