Dive Brief:

• PricewaterhouseCooper's (PwC) global media entertainment and media outlook for 2016 to 2020 predicts that the highest growth advertising area will be mobile, particularly mobile search and video ads.
• The five-year economic forecast looks at industry revenue, ad spending and internet access.
• "The past 20 years have brought a wave of disruption in technologies, distribution, and formats. All this, plus the resulting shifts in user behavior, are eroding the once-solid borders defining industries and pushing the boundary of what it means to be a 'media company,'" the PwC report explained.

Dive Insight:

Joining a number of other industry analysts, PwC announced that digital advertising will surpass linear TV next year. Entertainment and media spending will reach $720 billion by 2020, an increase from $603 billion last year.

Christopher Vollmer, principal with PwC's global strategy consulting firm Strategy&, told Adweek though they don't anticipate "an abrupt switchover during the forecast period," they do expect a continued movement towards more multichannel, digitally-enabled viewing.

Mobile ads are forecasted to reach 49.4% of total internet ad revenue by 2020, up from 34.7% in 2015, and mobile video will go from $3.5 billion in 2015 to $13.3 billion in 2020, a 30.3% lift.

"Our forecast reflects that [advertising] dollars will begin to catch up to where the eyeballs are. There's a lot more shifting of spend that can come out of areas that are maybe already allocated to digital, like money that's targeted more at desktop inventory today that can be shifted over to mobile. There's also money that can be shifted over from other budgets as well," Vollmer explained.