The compasses we typically use to help us plan and buy media may feel like they're spinning."
Nowadays, we’re concerned about many things: financial preparedness, getting sick and having enough toilet paper.
For those working in marketing and advertising, we’re also concerned about shifting and rebuilding our media plans for resilience during COVID-19, an upcoming recession and in times of volatility.
It’s abundantly clear there’s no more critical time than right now to pivot and protect our clients’ businesses while protecting our own. But the compasses we typically use to help us plan and buy media may feel like they’re spinning.
Media consumption habits have seemingly changed overnight and publishers and ad exchanges have a surplus of ad inventory, but their revenue streams are hurting from ad suppression and blocking. And, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a quarter of us have paused media through the end of the second quarter.
Here are five tips for pivoting your plans effectively:
Arm yourself with insights on consumer behaviors, channel trends and brand reactions.
- Consumers — What are they doing and how do they feel? Did you know 92% of consumers do not think you should stop advertising? Watch out for sentiment around your category, spending habits, content interests and expectations from your brand or brands in your industry.
- Channels — How is usage changing right now? Can we predict these behaviors will stick for a while? Take note of immediate changes, like video content consumption being up by 60% and a boost in streaming numbers. Not all of these trends will remain in the long run. We’ll go back to our old ways once the pandemic is over, we’re commuting to work, shopping in malls and watching sporting events on TV. Try to understand the longevity of these trends and their implications on your current channel mix, with an eye for the future as well.
- Brands — How are brands within and outside your category reacting to the situation? And more importantly, how are consumers reacting to their reactions?
Observe the successes and flops, while considering what to implement for your own brand. Livestream something, make a statement, keep silent or donate money to small- or medium-sized businesses.
Your actions could strengthen (or hurt) your brand’s rapport with loyal customers and prospects. Your agency and vendor partners can and should help with this task.
Before making changes, try to extract maximum value from what you have.
Now that you have armed yourself with external knowledge, it’s time to look internally and think about what has worked for your brand in the past, whether it will still work and, if so, for how long.
Whether specific channels, tactics or messages have been your workhorses or shown promising results, you’ll want to determine whether they can be salvaged and how. For example, the ubiquity of digital in our connected lives has helped the channel weather storms, such as the last recession, much better than other channels.
If social has been a key e-commerce driver, you may be in luck as usage has exploded. Now may be a good time to double down on this channel to increase frequency among your top-performing audiences.
Look at your pie (chart) and at the ingredients available.
If you weren’t considering making changes very soon, you likely wouldn’t be this far into the article. But much like a self-quarantined cook with skills (not me) can replace one ingredient for another, it’s important to know which replacements will produce something close to the original recipe.
Think about the channels you’ll need to act on and which replacements will disrupt your business the least. If live sports is your only reach-play, could you diversify your linear TV buy with non-sports programming or flex into connected TV? If you are committed to a handful of large networks like NBC and Discovery, they’d be happy to help you repurpose your inventory.
Also, fire sales could be a short-term cost efficiency to hitting new households and building reach.
We are predicting an insane marketplace for the third and fourth quarter of 2020 with $5 billion in political spending, $1.2 billion in Olympics reinvestments and billions more in postponed sports, so now is a good time to look in the pantry.
Find opportunities in the moment. It may be a great time to do that test you have been putting off.
My wife and I have delayed potty training our little girl for over a year. Guess what we have been doing this past week? It seems COVID-19 was the catalyst for an overdue yet impending action item, and in the same analogy, testing is critical to improving business.
That same test mindset should apply right now, arguably more than ever, for business to prosper. Think about the tests you have been meaning to do and if now is the right time to do them.
To use one example, matched-market tests work well when most variables are static. It may not seem like it, but right now may be a great time to do a matched-market lift. Most everyone is at home (user equality across markets) and media plans have shrunk down to a handful of channels (fewer channels means less influence on clean results). And you may be able to negotiate discounts as well.
Reprogram your measurement strategy accordingly to track success.
This tip may sound obvious to some, but shifting initial measurement strategies alongside plan shifts can be an afterthought, especially in chaotic times.
As you are thinking about making changes to your media plan during the pandemic or beyond, you may need to recalibrate your measurement strategy and data sources, plus run feasibility checks with your measurement partners.
If you are implementing tests, ensure that proper tagging is in place. Adding new partners? You may need new measurement solutions.
Hopefully, these tips will help you in pivoting your media plan. But just remember, you are not alone — and nobody has all the answers. We are all in the same boat.
