How Shelter-in-Place is Affecting the Media Landscape

• Struggling to find the right tone for the campaigns into which you invested hundreds of hours before the pandemic? You’re not alone. This NYT piece has a good round-up of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• Heard of Quibi yet? It’s too soon to know if this new bite-sized video platform will stick but the roster of Hollywood stars (like, all of them) involved is very impressive.
• If you’re having trouble having quality brainstorms with your creative teams, check out this free eBook that has some fantastic tips.
• This great piece on Ad Age summarizes expert thinking on media strategy during a recession. TLDR (that’s “Too Long Didn’t Read” for future reference):
  • Recessions or downturns do not mean lower ROIs. In over 100 cases, more than half of brands saw improvements in ROI during the last recession.

• • Media spending contributes to short-term growth and longer-term brand building, even during a recession. On average, brands that increased media investment realized roughly a 17 percent growth in incremental sales, and more than half saw subsequent improvements in year-over-year ROIs over a two-year period during the recession.

• • Removing media guarantees losses during a recession. On average, brands that removed media investment suffered an 18 percent loss in incremental sales.

• • Removing media investment exacerbates losses for struggling brands. Two-thirds of losses in incremental sales during the last recession were driven by lower investments while one-third was driven by lower consumer demand.

Milly Sauber, our Media Director, with the latest round of resources for your media planning:

• Television consumption is set to see an increase upwards of 60%, according to data Nielsen has put together based on projections of weather-related events. This includes traditional broadcast television and OTT channels. Now is a great time to add some OTT or Broadcast to your media plan, as households are consuming a lot of content across screens.
• Curious to know which streaming service has seen the biggest boom in subscribers? The answer can be found at the end of the email! It’s between these four:
  1. Hulu
  2. Amazon Prime Video
  3. Disney+
  4. HBOG

• YouTube Ads have at least a one-week review time within Google Ads, so if you have a timely YouTube ad that needs to run, allow for up to 2 weeks of approval time before your ads are eligible to run.
• Are you wondering how your Google and Bing campaigns are measuring up during this time? Wordstream has compiled an updated set of Benchmarks for Google and Bing Search, Google and Bing Shopping, and Google Display.
• Curious to see eCommerce trends in the way of COVID-19? ConvertCart, an analytics tool, has created a real-time dashboard to track eCommerce performance across a wide array of industries.
• TikTok has seen a boom in users and is quickly approaching 1 billion accounts. The social platform has also sparked a lot of trends during stay at home orders, like Whipped Coffee and choreographed dances the whole family can learn.

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One of the most difficult things about the situation is how quickly the world is changing. It’s hard to make smart decisions when the variables change minute by minute. If you need an extra brain or two, we’re here to talk through your conundrums, maybe over a video cocktail.

PS: The answer is “c” Disney+.