Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2017 is out, all 355 slides of it, aggregating a wealth of research to present a detailed global picture on how and why online - in the widest sense - continues to grow and evolve.
Direct references to travel are few and far between, although there are more than enough bigger picture insights for the industry to consider.
And it is pictures where travel - represented by airlines - gets its fifteen seconds of fame. In the section on online advertising and commerce, there is a subsection devoted to the use of imagery in advertising, teed up by a quote from Ben Silbermann, founder and CEO of Pinterest:
"A lot of the future of search is going to be about images instead of keywords."
Meeker references research from Simply Measured, which found that Qatar Airways was the most effective brand in terms of leveraging user generated content (UGC) on Instagram, based on the proportion of posts which were "regrammed." Qatar does better than Red Bull, Starbucks and Netflix, and is joined on the list of brands by Cathay Pacific, Turkish Airlines and Emirates. (Click here for a larger version in a new window)
However, looking at the source rather than the summary, the chart is based on analysis of the 11 brands only, rather than the wider market.
The study also references another piece of research which highlights the sweetspot where users' imagery intersects with search, social and advertising. Mavrck found that "effective UGC can generate 6.9x engagement than brand generated content on Facebook."
Voice search is already accounting for 20% of queries, the study points out, while image-based front and back ends are advancing technically, prompting the claim that images "can replace typing".
KPBC lays down a marker for the long-term by comparing Google - which built its advertising business around "user-typed input (words)" and Snap, which is starting to build its advertising business around "user-uploaded input (images)". Google has been public since 2004, Snap has been public for a couple of months.
As well as future-gazing, the study also looks at the here and now of online advertising. Mobile is driving ad growth and, out of the $73 billion spent in the US on online advertising in 2016 (up from $60 billion in 2015) mobile hoovered up more than desktop, just.
But there is a gap between where US consumers spend their time and where businesses spend their advertising dollars. (Click here for a larger version in a new window)
TV still dominates in the US in terms of time spent and ad spend, but on a global scale, the overall spend on online will overtake TV for the first time in 2017.
Among all the positive signs for the growth of online and mobile advertising, the slide around the increased take-up of ad-blocking is worth noting. In the US, 18% of people have ad-blocking software installed on their desktop but only 1% on mobile, with the reverse applying in India and China. (Click here for a larger version in a new window)
Another headwind is the ongoing concern that marketers have about being able to gauge their return on investment, particularly for social media campaigns.
Click here to access the study in full.