The Anticipated COVID-19 Ad Spend Impact and How to Minimize The Loss
The Coronavirus pandemic continues and so does the economic uncertainty. While we, too, can only project and make educated guesses on what the full impact will be on the advertising industry, we are in the unique position to be able to help offset the overall trends by successfully adapting our direct sales efforts and providing direct campaigns and PMP revenue to our partners.
The IAB released a summary of findings after talking to a group of buy-side stakeholders on what their plans are for changes to spend and strategies stemming from the pandemic. We encourage you to read the full report, but have listed some of the more pertinent data points for you here.
Where We Are Now
Digital ad spend is down across the industry by about 33%
More than a third of advertisers are changing their marketing tactics entirely
Advertisers are being much more strict on audience/brand safety targeting and their requirements
While most adjustments to advertising budgets have already been made for the first half of 2020, the majority of second half budgets have yet to be determined
Live Entertainment, Travel, Food, Auto, and Technology based advertisers make up the majority of missing ad spend
Some Positives
Digital spend is not only expected to take less of a hit than traditional spend, but is also expected to rebound faster
The majority of spend impact is expected to be in Q1 and Q2 2020, with a more modest impact in Q3 and Q4
What You Can Do To Minimize the Impact
1. Re-evaluate the ad categories you are blocking
You may have put category blocks in place early in your on-boarding. Consider allowing the additional demand to help increase competition for your site, even if just for the short term
2. Add video
Video advertising remains strong. In order to increase your video inventory – and even if you don’t have original video content, don’t hesitate to have us activate our outstream unit.
3. Stay away from Corona related key words in your content
Advertisers are either blocking their ads from showing up on corona related content entirely or paying much less for those placements. While it may drive traffic, it wont be of high revenue value.
4. Consider increasing your available ad inventory
Additional content or just ad slots will increase overall ad availability and help steady the decline in revenue. We’ve created a list of actions you can take right now to drive up your RPM.
What We Are Doing
1. Staying in close contact with Google
As a Certified Publishing Partner we have unique access to google as a close partner. We are working with them daily to gain insights and tools/tactics to help increase ad buying specifically on SHE Media.
2. Working with brands directly
Our sales team is in continued communication with the brands themselves gaining valuable knowledge about how they are planning to adjust their ad spend. We use this information to get ahead of trends before they start.
3. Safeguarding your business
We are focused on constantly evaluating the partners we work with to ensure their financial stability throughout this crisis. In addition, Penske Media (The parent company of SHE Media) is extremely well positioned to weather this storm with you.
4. We are here for you at any time
We have increased support hours to help address the increased amount of support requests we’ve been receiving. We are happy to report that to date we’ve been seeing promising results from those publishers who have received an optimization audit from our service advisors.
Related Articles
The Digital Economy and Coronavirus
The History Of Advertising In A Recession
Stay in touch
While we continue to monitor the situation, please do reach out to support@shemedia.com with any questions or concerns. As we have new information, we will continue to communicate them via updates to this post or in our SHE Media Partner Network Facebook page.
Sincerely,
Ryan, Deb and your SHE Media Partner Team