With so much attention on social media for brand marketing, you might be surprised to learn that the majority of companies are not relying on social for revenue, but instead for consumer engagement. In fact, recent studies show that social media budgets are still hovering around 10% of the total with most online budgets going to paid ads. But ads are still a challenge – other recent studies show that Baby Boomers and Millennials don’t like and are blocking them. And here are some more important stats recently collected by Hubspot (http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/horrifying-display-advertising-stats?utm_campaign=blog-rss-emails&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=22283717):

Display ad viewability rates did not budge between 2013 and 2014. (Source: comScore)
The average clickthrough rate of display ads across all formats and placements is 0.06% (Source: Display Benchmarks Tool)
Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months. (Source: PageFair)
There are now 198 million active ad block users around the world. (Source: PageFair)
A 2013 study revealed that 28% of respondents admitted to hiding their activities from advertisers — second only to criminals. (Source: Pew Research Center)
A study revealed that only 2.8% of participants thought that ads on website were relevant. (Source: Infolinks and bannerblindness.org)
A January 2014 study found that 18- to 34-year-olds were far more likely to ignore online ads, such as banners and those on social media and search engines, than they were traditional TV, radio and newspaper ads. (Source: eMarketer)
About 50% of clicks on mobile ads are accidental. (Source: GoldSpot Media)
54% of users don’t click banner ads because they don’t trust them. (Source:BannerSnack)
33% of internet users find display ads completely intolerable (Source: Adobe)
And other studies have shown that Gen Xr’s and Millennials really dislike native ads — stories and videos that look like news or objective information but instead are ads. So overall, there are some real challenges ahead for brand digital marketing.