A little while back, we examined an interesting piece in Adweek that culled together some recent digital marketing stats. Last week, Adweek posted a new piece called 9 Interesting and Fun Digital Marketing Stats (by Christopher Heine).

As before, the content presented here spans several industries, but the underlying principles are as illuminating as the numbers are illustrative. So let’s take a closer look at these newly reported statistics and then, one by one, dig deeper into the information so we can explore how these numbers can help your business.

1. Heineken claims that it’s finding success with Twitter videos for its #SubwaySymphony effort. For instance, the beer brand told Adweek that the video below has been engaged with 1.1 million times on the social site. The clip has established an engagement rate of nearly 14 percent, which easily bests the company’s benchmark rate of 5 percent.

It doesn’t matter how clever or innovative a campaign is unless it gets results. And although there’s tried-and-true template for garnering engagement, the success of Heineken’s Subway Symphony campaign can teach us a few things.

The premise of this campaign is to change the (annoying) sound of subway turnstiles into something more musical that varies by station. “Rush hour, instead of being a nightmare,” describes James Murphy, the architect of this idea, “would suddenly become possibly the most beautiful time to be on the subway.”

There’s a lot that’s great about this idea, but two things stand out:

1. Most advertisements—to some degree—feel like they are impinging on our everyday life. Look at this! Check this out! Buy this now! But the Subway Symphony campaign doesn’t feel like an impingement, but rather an improvement of a typical daily activity. This makes the message not only more accessible but almost coveted in a way.

2. There’s nothing inherently Heineken-like about this idea, which should earn the beer-maker extra credit for figuring out a way to take something fun and off-beat, and then cleverly crafting it into a memorable brand experience.

2. After the world discovered last week that Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer hunted down and killed Zimbabwe’s celebrity lion, Cecil, the Internet predictably exploded in protest. Here’s just one snippet of how big uproar became: Per a Digiday post, Amobee Brand Intelligence found 672,000 tweets about Cecil the Lion in the first day after the outrage began hitting critical mass. And Brandwatch learned that the #CecilTheLion hashtag garnered 2 billion impressions, Digiday also reported.

Well, they don’t call it “viral” for nothing, right? All too often when we think about viral content it’s about the breakthrough sensation of things like cat videos and movie mash-ups, but let’s not forget that—for better or worse—social media is also an incredible tool for collectively congregating sentiment of all kinds.

So what do those 672,000 tweets and 2 billion impressions tell us? Not only that the potential reach of online content can be instantly enormous, but also that because news can now spread so quickly it’s critical to stay ahead of any story involving you or your business (or even, in some cases, your industry as a whole). Remember: social media is a conversation and although that conversation tends to typically be one-sided (or maybe even because of that) it’s important to keep an ear close to that digital wall.

3. Standard Media Index, which tracks eight out of 10 biggest advertising agencies in the United States, found that domestic digital ad spending lifted by 16 percent between October and June. That marked a year-over-year total increase of $3 billion, SMI said.

16% may not sound like a major surge, but it’s especially significant when that uptick represents $3 billion. And even more significant when you factor in how quickly the digital advertising space has evolved in an industry with so many checks and balances that there’s often a lag in mobilizing.

Long story short: for anyone who thought that digital marketing was a flash in the pan, that pan has grown so large—so quickly—that it’s no longer possible to ignore.

4. Mobile ad spending in France rose 63 percent year over year during the first half of 2015, according to eMarketer. Mobile accounted for 21 percent of all digital spend, or €91 million, the New York researcher said.

Continuing that un-ignorable theme from the statistic listed before, we see that it’s not just in the United States where this change is taking place.

It’s important to note, of course, that ad spending in itself is not indicative of results, but it does signify how seriously the digital space is now being taken (particularly mobile, which is growing at an astronomical rate). It also signifies, in way, a sort of digital gold rush that’s brewing; and, as we learned with that golden race-for-riches back in 1849, it’s better to get in early than arrive to the party late…

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 (Stats #5-9)!

Read more: