For Dunkin’, the routine of customers getting morning coffee on the way to work was greatly disrupted by the virus and had an immediate impact on their business, but the gut reaction was to focus on how to do the right thing.

Lusby will be a participant in this month’s IAB NewFronts

Early on, this meant doing what they could to adhere to the brand’s three-word ethos: smart, strong and kind. Kindness in particular helped to steer the brand in its initial response.

“Right out of the gate, we made a donation to our foundation, the Joy In Childhood Foundation, which serves to feed the hungry,” Lusby says. “Early on, whether it was kids in schools who weren’t going to get meals through the public school system, or people who need that assistance anyway, we stepped that up and made a $1,250,000 contribution to make sure that we could take care of customers.”

Safety measures within the store were also a priority, with Dunkin’ focusing on their drive-through policies, putting up plastic screens at registers, and investing in their app to make digital ordering easier.

“We try to do the things that make it better for the community around us and also better when people are with us.” Lusby says.

As far as what they have learned from their response, this crisis has reinforced the idea that consumers will never remember an overreaction, but never forget an underreaction. This means that making difficult decisions quickly is paramount.

“That’s something that will hopefully continue further on, post-COVID as we move forward, is the ability to be more nimble, make difficult decisions quickly, and move forward,” Lusby says.

In thinking about tone and messaging with consumers, the company has had to focus less on the product and more about informing customers about how their operations work. One example was doing local marketing campaigns around hours of operation and helping to guide customers through using the app.

“When you’re in a franchisee system across multiple markets, it’s not always easy,” Lusby says. “But I think that’s one of the things that makes us stronger coming out of all of this.”

This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020.  This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB. 

The goal of SeeHer is to increase the percentage of accurate portrayals of women and girls in US advertising.

McHugh says marketers have are facing a unique moment as that viewers will be watching with a heightened awareness as to what space brands are taking at this particular time.

“One of the conversations that we always have is around the importance of how brands show up, especially in times like this,” McHugh says. “Consumers are always watching.”

SeeHer’s research explores how consumers feel about brands representing things like diversity, but now, in particular, brands are being closely watched for where and how they are marketing during this particular moment.

“I think [consumers] are counting on brands, especially established brands, to lead the way,” McHugh says.

With the NewFronts approaching, another topic that hasn’t been buried as a result of COVID is the rapid evolution of streaming platforms. According to McHugh, it’s still all about where the consumer is.

“From what I understand, video consumption patterns continue to change and migrate,” McHugh says. “I think we’ve seen an increase in video consumption through this entire situation that we’re all in.”

Consumers have adapted faster during this situation because they have the time and access to explore more than they would in their normal routines. The question is, will these new habits stick once COVID has come and passed.

“I guess the proof will be in the pudding when everyone goes back, one day, to whatever normal looks like,” McHugh says.

This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020.  This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB. 

VAB and Beet.TV are launching an upcoming series called “TV Reset” that chats with industry leaders about consumer behaviors during the pandemic. Much of this partnership is linked to the consumer study that VAB did called As Time Goes By: How Media Consumption is Helping America Cope.

“Let’s peel back the curtain and be able to hear of how they’re dealing with the flexibility that I know that marketers are looking for,” DeLauro says. “What’s going on with live sports, I know there’s a lot of questions about that, about programming, and the programming hiatus that’s going on now and how that’s going to be dealt with, and overall how they’re just talking to each other about marketers expectations and what’s going to happen in the future.”

DeLauro highlights two main takeaways from this study. The first is that maintaining a share of voice now will cost brands less in the future.

“When I say maintain your share of voice, that doesn’t mean that you have to maintain your spend,” DeLauro says. “It just means that you have to maintain where you are compared to your competition. And sometimes your competition in an economic downturn starts to spend less, so that means you can actually spend less but still maintain your share of voice in the marketplace.”

The second takeaway is that right now is a particularly good time to advertise.

In the 2008 recession, there were many brands, like Walmart and T-Mobile, that were able to catapult their business because they leaned into the downturn and in many cases doubled down. Many of these success stories put a particular focus on brand building.

“What we’ve seen since the start of COVID-19 is a lot of DTC and challenger brands are doing the same thing,” DeLauro says. “They’re looking at this as an opportunity to go out and build their brand and try to take share in those marketplaces.”

Nerdwallet, Tommy John, and Grubhub are three examples of brands using the current downturn as a way to gain brand awareness. Direct-to-consumer brands, in particular have increased their spend in television, specifically, because they have some of the best data and analytics in the industry, and TV is what is giving them the clearest results.

“I think that’s something that legacy brands should really be aware of and consider if they’re thinking about pulling back their spend,” DeLauro says.

The main lesson that the pandemic has echoed is that brands have to work for humans and they must put their needs first.

“Let’s focus on how brands can help in these trying times,” Carter says. “And as we evolve through the lifecycle of the virus, let’s focus on how we can help customers, consumers, and businesses get back on their feet. That really has to be the guiding light of the work we do.”

Avoiding the hard sell should only help to deepen the relationship with customers. Carter added that although this period is unprecedented, there is a silver lining. With no standard formula or rulebook to follow, brands have been forced to innovate, which has led to significant growth in the industry overall.

“We’ve been on a super highway to the future of digitalization and ecommerce that frankly is fantastic for us,” Carter says.

Some examples of this include serving customers via contactless delivery or virtual consultations. Industries have had to reform how they do business in a rapid fashion, and in turn, marketers have had to deliver changes that they have been talking and debating about for some time now.

“I’m thinking about all of the big issues and as a collective with our marketers we’re urging the marketplace, ‘Let’s go and tackle some of those right now. Let’s go and drive reform, let’s break the legacy,’” Carter says.

Some of these issues include not being able to have digital competitive media intelligence across the entire ecosystem, driving the casebook and use case for diversity, greater transparency in the digital ecosystem, changing the timing of the upfront to be more flexible.

“If we don’t get inventive now, we’re not going to survive,” Carter says. “We need to come out of this strong and together for our customers and for the economy.”

This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia.  Please visit this page for additional segments from the series. 

The industry is now entering a second phase of the COVID pandemic where companies are thinking more long term about the opportunities available given the evolved consumer behaviors.

“[We are now figuring out what it means] to think about media overall and how we can better connect media itself and messaging using all that we have at our hands when it comes to data and technology,” Richman says.

The goals of this next stage include making the tonality of the messaging more relevant and being more service-focused in that messaging. It also means thinking creatively about how companies invest differently.

“Now it’s more towards that creativity and how do we really unleash the power of technology and data to make that happen and make it real,” Richman says.

Richman also touched on the popular questions that are specific to brand marketers at the moment.

“There’s always this aspect of inspiration and what does the future look like and am I moving fast enough to get there,” Richman says. “But there’s also the underlying principle of what is measurable and how will this drive my business.”

Right now there is more emphasis than ever on what incremental dollars can be added where against what audiences, programs, and platforms in order to see what equates to meaningful sales. It has created a dynamic where the more innovative forecasting techniques must also be balanced with a more conservative approach.

“You’ve got that dichotomy of the creativity and the innovation and the no boundaries with also the realities of demonstrating how we can learn, understand, and iterate to get to their sales goals,” Richman says.

This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020.  This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB.  To request a free invitation to the 5-day virtual event, visit this page:

Selling products for infants, Danone knows that it’s extremely important that they are aware of what context they are advertising in, and that brand safety is paramount. 

“It’s even more important that the context in which we are talking online and on mobile is extremely controlled, extremely respectful of the parents who are online and are looking at this content.” Doat says. 

The pandemic hasn’t changed the importance around this, but in her position at Danone, Doat-Le Bigot has picked up on some ways that the doing business has changed. The first of the trends that she has noticed is that people are buying online in a more diverse way.

“They were not looking at one-stop-shop to buy everything online because they had more time to discover content, discover places of discussion, discover forums, discover a new form of influence.” Doat says. “Influence marketing in digital has been widely disrupted during this pandemic.”

Direct-to-consumer sales for many of their products has risen in an unprecedented way. People were traditionally not eager to buy food online, but that has changed.

“In a way, this pandemic has made us leapfrog by two or three years in the usage of consumers to buy online,” Doat says. “And that’s for me probably a shift which we could foresee the beginning of it, the seeds of it, but not the momentum that we have now.”

The pandemic’s effect on people’s ways of living has made it so that they simply will not be able to spend money in the same way.

“It has an impact on the affordability and accessibility of the products that we need to think very seriously so that we address as many consumers as possible in view and in the know of the new capabilities of people to actually spend money on food.” Doat says.

Given these changes, Danone’s approach to media investment, especially around news, has changed as well. The company has steered clear of advertising during live news, because there is not as much of a way to control the context. There’s some certain thematic, news-driven content that they have found some success with that deals with topics like food and water accessibility.

“We are never doing it if the level of control is not high into what type of content is provided,” Doat says. “You have new media platforms which are very able to give you the kind of thematic they are approaching and the ways they are investigating. If we believe this is very objective and not political and not polemical, there is no reason not to put advertising in this type of context.”

This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.

According to the National Association of Automotive Dealers, 80-90% of US car dealers will be transacting online by the end of the year, which is unprecedented.

“We’ve seen necessity drive the change over the past six weeks and moving forward where you had states restricting who could be buying vehicles online, lots of roadblocks in the way of advancing that industry to that e-commerce industry that we’re living with today.”

In a tight market for advertisers, Mynster auto advertisers are pausing their spend and reevaluate their messaging. Brands that are using smart data to determine their messaging and continue spending based on these insights have been successful.

“I think if we look at historical automotive trends, when we saw big recessions in the ‘70s, when we saw the recessions again in 2008,” Mynster says. “The advertisers who have leaned in and spent more and found a compelling and compassionate message have come out as winners.”

Mynster cites Hyundai as a brand that emerged after 2008 as a winner with its Assurance Program that provided relief on the consumer side. She believes that those brands who will be creative and lean into the market by spending more will find similar success in the long run.

IHS Markit is pooling data with TransUnion to help identify the households that will be buying this summer as dealerships begin to open up.

“There’s going to be over 3 million households in the U.S. that have to get a replacement vehicle, their leases are coming to expire and they’re going to need a new vehicle, so working with TransUnion to help identify for our advertisers and those media platforms that these are the households that are going to be buying, make sure they’re in your campaign—it’s going to be critical.”

In order to accelerate the automotive marketplace, Mynster said that we will likely see dealerships and OEM creating frictionless processes for the consumer, such as home deliveries. She also believes that by necessity, there will be a drive in an already-forward movement in data-driven TV.

“Platforms that can identify the appropriate households that will deliver the greatest return for brands will be winners and ones that can prove out the success of that will also be winners.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  

Auto brands like Nissan have had no choice but to move to a more digital strategy. Many dealerships are not considered essential businesses and instead of forcing consumers into a shopping process that they’re not comfortable with, brands now want to offer options for both. This way, even when these businesses do open back up, the customers feel as safe and supported as possible.

“We and our dealers have been working really closely with our local governments on, how we can actually start to have virtual retailing, which, in automotive wasn’t very prevalent, and what we’ve done on our end is actually start to accelerate ecommerce projects and shopping tools that were maybe seven months if not a year down the road and accelerate those so that we could begin implementation and launch those over the next weeks into the next couple of months,” Witherspoon says.

According to Witherspoon, higher priced items like cars still aren’t retailing online at the same rate as they would at dealerships, but that this is due to regulatory reasons, and lack of infrastructure there, which is what Nissan is working to fix with more urgency. For marketing, Witherspoon and her team have tried to look more specifically at the consumer sentiment in these times, and then evolve their marketing messages accordingly.

“It’s definitely a different approach versus what typically happens which is, ‘this is what we as the brand or marketer wants to say, now we’re going to put it out there and let you adapt to it,’” Witherspoon says. “It’s definitely the other way around. And even now that we’re a couple of months in, we’re starting to tweak and adjust all of our existing communications over time based on the feedback that we’re getting from consumers and what the consumer sentiment is.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, this meant avoiding a heavy sales push and focusing more on instilling trust and confidence in Nissan as a brand and an awareness of what is going on in the world. Over time, this has adjusted slightly, with the brand pinpointing confidence factors, whether it is services they can provide, payment deferrals, or other more specific messages.

Plans have changed around planning large media buys as well. For Nissan, this meant pausing the launch of one of their newest Sentra model until a time in which there will be more demand.

“We’re looking at re-planning that,” Witherspoon says. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last several weeks looking at the ways that we can predict or project where consumer sentiment and where their media behavior is going to be.”

This includes considering a range of scenarios, from the optimistic outcome of a complete return back to normal, to the more pessimistic view of this having a long lasting impact on consumer sentiment. This requires flexibility, from brands to marketers to publishers.

“I think this will change what the Upfront process is,” Witherspoon says. “I think that it was already starting to move in a more flexible direction and a much more advanced targeting standpoint, but I think it’s really, ‘what is the flexibility with your marketing dollars?’ I think that’s where we’ll see the next shift.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  We recorded Allyson in her home in Nashville and Matt at his in Chicago.

For many on the buy side, the knee-jerk reaction to the news of the pandemic was to not want to spend at all in order to avoid any association with the virus. Amobee’s market intelligence analytics have aimed to determine what kinds of content consumers are engaging with, and among other valuable insights, has led to a greater understanding among buyers to approach Covid-19 as not a singular topic, but as many different topics.

“When you dive into it, what you find is that there’s actually a lot of opportunity in there from an advertising perspective and arguably, we’re going into a period of time here that could be the single biggest opportunity for market-share shift for brands that has happened in a generation,” Smolin says.

This alters the way that both the buy side and the sell side adjust their approaches at the core. On the buy side, this means being really data driven and keeping attune to shifts in trends on a weekly basis.

“It is a really real-time, dynamic environment that we’re living in right now. Patterns change, they change by region, they’re changing daily.”

An AdExchanger article by TransUnion’s David Dowhan reinforces this message, saying that brands are increasingly turning to first-party data in order to closely monitor consumer behavior.

“Seasoned marketers are taking more stock in tools and technologies that help leverage additional, complementary data holistically to make the most of their own audience insights,” Dowhan says.

Smolin added that the sell side also needs to respond to this change in media consumption by being increasingly interactive with brands and agencies in order to understand how to best serve these new opportunities.

The lives of consumers have changed so drastically. Interests, intents, amounts of disposable income—this is just a small sample of the ways that the audience has transformed in the past couple months. For advertisers, the knee-jerk reaction to avoid COVID has been flipped around as they have opened their eyes to greater opportunity.

“There’s nuance about how life in America is changing and how your relationship as a brand to consumers should change as well,” Smolin says.

Along with this shift in media consumption comes the need to reimagine how advertisers should change their messaging and where they find their audiences. Smolin uses sporting events as an example, but is confident that this attention to first-party data will help to track where the viewers are exploring.

“It’s a crazy time right now,” Smolin says. “But if people are staying on top of the market insights and the media planning data and they are measuring for media efficiency, there are actually tremendous opportunities for them in market right now on both the buy and sell side to really move the needle.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

What resulted was an ad that featured front-line workers and how AT&T was helping them solve business and technology problems on the fly. According to  SVP of news content partnerships for WarnerMedia Ad Sales and head of Courageous Studios Michal Shapira, speaking to Beet.TV, the storytelling was “relevant and passionate,”

More brands are turning to Courageous for help navigating their communications and marketing strategies during Covid-19. The branded content studio, with its ties to CNN, has journalism at its DNA, says Shapira, and it uses those instincts and tactics to develop cultural stories on behalf of brands. In any environment, brands are looking to relay interesting, purpose-driven and relevant stories to customers. Now, the stakes are higher, customers are in a rapidly evolving and uncertain time and the risk of coming off as tone deaf or insensitive is a one weighing heavily on brands.

“We’ve helped our clients develop purpose-driven campaigns that are authentic. It’s natural to us at a time when a lot of brands are looking to do that type of campaign or creative, and want to tell their own purpose-driven stories as they relate to the health crisis,” says Shapira. The biggest challenge, for Courageous as well as the brands, is being nimble enough to respond when the situation changes. “What might work today may not work two weeks from now,” she says.

Finding and sending the right message is part of the battle. Data analytics still need to inform purpose-driven marketing. Courageous works with Xandr to deliver branded content to the right audiences. In addition to targeting, Xandr provides data on audiences that can help brands inform their creative campaigns ensuring that content isn’t uniform.

Shapira says that this approach helps brands maintain a presence during an undeniably difficult time for advertising.

“A lot of [brands] feel strongly about having a presence right now, and not going dark,” she says. “Their customers want to hear from them; they want to be there for them and we want to help them do that.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

According to DeCicco, four key variables are impacting how audience planning is evolving right now: privacy and consent, depreciation of cookies and the future of identity, the increasing height of the walled gardens and number of walls being erected, and the pressures being created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID has forced really every one of our brands to evolve their understanding of their target audience and how best to reach them and how best to communicate with them.” DeCicco said.

Mindshare is performing a weekly consumer insights study on COVID-19, and it’s showing that clients must react to three new realities: changes in channel consumption, purchase behavior, and hyperlocality. Users are increasing their time of consumption in every category from video to podcast streaming.

“It’s forcing us to use our scenario planning tools and reallocate marketing mix if you are going to continue advertising during this.” DeCicco said. “That’s because we’re seeing not all channels being created equal during this time. The rate of consumption increases by channel is different. So you need to look at each channel individually, how the rate of change is happening within the channel among your most valuable consumers, and then reprioritize which channels to spend against.”

Purchase behavior has also changed drastically in some categories like groceries where the industry has had to pivot to ecommerce and a new online strategy. Consumers are buying these products, but very differently. These consumer behaviors are becoming more in line with local communities.

“As consumers get more connected to their communities during this time out of necessity or emerging habit, which again is a shift from where we’ve collectively been going as a more globally minded society,” DeCicco said. “But due to these restrictions on the way consumers can engage now, location has become much more critical to understanding and determining how to capitalize on certain behaviors and in many ways it’s becoming the determining factor of how people are behaving right now.”

The role of context to inform both audience and content is becoming much more intertwined, too. Even in a post-cookie world, there are three key data signals that still persist and inform how people invest in media: customer data, publisher data, and context.

First-party customer records are key to unlocking loyalty strategies and prospecting strategies. The publisher data signal is also important because anyone who can offer content for customer data and can successfully monetize that data can compete in the marketing ecosystem.

“The notion of more walled gardens probably generates a collective shudder among the advertising community,” DeCicco said. “But I think these publishers, these, dare I say, fenced gardens, will be a little bit more willing and creative to bring opportunities to advertisers using not just their data but their powerful content publishing arms to create unique experiences and that’s something that the big four-walled gardens can’t necessarily do.”

The third signal, context, is still critically important and is fueled by a new wave of innovation that is making technologies more precise and intelligent around audience and content.

“So it’s really going to be that marriage between audience and contextual data,” DeCicco said. “That will be the new way forward. Especially as the scale of certain types of behavioral data sets wanes with the depreciation of third-party cookies.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.  

Amplifi is a unit of the Dentsu Aegis Network.

Companies have gotten better at using data to identify clients’ most valuable audiences, and it’s important they don’t lose perspective of where those ads should run. Instead, it’s crucial to holistically focus on finding the right people in the right place, which is where this mix of targeting tools and contextual marketing becomes all the more crucial.

“It is really critical that we bring those two things together so we think about contextual alignment matched up against audience definition when we’re placing our buys across all channels,” Law says.

In order for Amplifi to do this, the company utilizes the M1 tool in partnership with Merkle as well as other data platforms. But a big part of finding success is for data analytics companies to forge partnerships with media owners that have vast content libraries and use them to inform the most appropriate buys.

Law added that audience-based guarantees are increasingly becoming a bigger part of the picture, too, as the industry moves from demographics to audiences. Access to greater data has meant greater precision in reaching people, and this idea of reach is particularly important looking forward.

“Reach is a big story in today’s marketplace,” Law said. “To make sure that we’re using the data not just to think about audiences per se, but how do we think about audiences defined by light TV viewers as much as we’re thinking about audiences as those most likely to buy a car, those most likely to shop at a retail outlet, those most likely to make a purchase in a bar or a restaurant?”

For these reasons, Law argues that the industry needs to move away from legacy behaviors, and trend towards reaching people in real time to drive business outcomes.

In these particularly trying times, Law says that Amplifi has been working off of a framework but with a recognition that the current obstacles are unlike anything before. Their course of action is to gather as much information as possible and be in frequent communication with partners to gather an understanding of their current challenges.

“Right now, we’ve just been in a hyper-communicative state, trying to share as much as we can,” Law says. “Consistency of communication, transparency of communication, partnership, and making sure we’re sharing all we can and making the best decisions for each and every one of our clients to get through this.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.  

Jeremy Cohen, the vp and head of global content partnerships at Publicis Groupe, says consumers are “hyper-tuned” to the digital experience right now – meaning they have less patience for poor ad experiences but will be responsive when the messaging, tone and positioning is right. 

“It’s important in this COVID environment that people feel supported across the board,” Cohen says. “Everyone wants to feel like an individual.” 

A few converging strategies can support that mission, which according to Cohen boils down to a “consumer first is key” mindset. First, he says, audience based targeting and contextual targeting can be leveraged at the same time to understand what audiences are consuming from a content perspective and personalization perspective. “So creating what seems to be a personalized experience by leveraging both audience-level data and contextual targeting, that drives the greatest outcome for brands and efficiencies as well,” Cohen says. 

It’s impossible to discuss targeting and personalization right now with mourning the long, belabored death of the cookie. Third-party cookies are in the process of being wiped out by Google, which, while not entirely unexpected, sent the marketing world into a tailspin. Cohen chooses to see it as an advantage for brands and a return of creativity. This time, it will be bolstered by data.

“The cookie is a tax. It’s so widespread, it’s not a strategy,” says Cohen. “Now that it’s going away, brands have more opportunity to create their own unique strategies to give them advantages in the marketplace.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

That means brands and publishers have to change their messaging. “Context is even more important now,” says Scott. Context has always been a “proxy for audience”, she adds. If you contextually understand behavior, intent, interest and demographic, you understand your audience. Xandr, the advertising and analytics arm of AT&T, is analyzing what strategies are emerging and what’s resonating. As Scott points out, brands are most embracing the “empathy and humanity angle,” with messages like “stay at home, save lives.”

“Making your creative and your messaging really engaging and getting to the heart of people – brands can lean into that,” Scott says. It’s certainly not the time for the hard sell or aggressive performance metrics. Unless you’re a brand primed for performance right now, like one selling hand sanitizer, that is.

It’s also time to embrace technology and new ad formats that brands might have otherwise been leaving to the wayside. “This is a world on demand,” Scott says. “So being able to adapt to that kind of consumption is needed.”

That could mean testing out artificial intelligence or live shoppable content, something that NBCUniversal’s new universal checkout platform could help facilitate. Right now, people may be open to buying in unexpected places, and brands should test that.

“Creative is evolving to meet the temperament of the new viewer,” Scott says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

Consulting is one of the many parts of Horizon’s business model, and it’s one where Williams sees a great opportunity. There are a lot of businesses whose core value propositions aren’t relevant or can’t exist right now because of COVID-19, so there’s a great need for realizing a marketing and communications strategy that helps to pivot their business in an effective way.

“For us, there are countless brands that have been sidelined because of this pandemic,” Williams says. “And instead of it being kind of a management of a portfolio of media investments, it becomes kind of a consultative approach to understanding the business viability and the opportunity to shift strategy from an operations standpoint.”

For many brands who have relied heavily on sporting events to stay relevant and convey value, Williams said that they have had to reimagine how to pivot these brands to get in front of the right audience and keep the scale and volume required to drive the same level of success.

“It’s been a lot of optimizing around consumer behavior – leaning into digital channels,” Williams says. “And then it’s been a lot of pivoting around messaging so that there’s something more relevant and potentially less opportunistic to share out during this sensitive period of time.”

One example that Williams gives is brands shifting the focus of TV ads from a promotional value proposition to providing more consumer options around things like payment flexibility or low-contact delivery.

Some brands, however, have been fully sidelined by COVID-19, and Williams says that this is a problem across the industry. Still, many of the responses from advertisers have been unsurprising.

“You’ve seen folks gravitate towards more measurable and accountable channels,” Williams says. “We’ve seen some drop off in traditional media; we’ve seen some recovery in what have historically been referred to as lower-funnel marketing activities including affiliate marketing and surge marketing and to a lesser extent social marketing as well. I think you’re going to see folks gravitate towards those types of performance-related channels because they’re flexible and they’re dynamic both on the messaging side of things and on the media side of things.”

These lower-risk advertisements give way to a great importance around measurement and data. Williams says that all of the data and performance-based parts of Horizon Media are high traffic right now because marketers are needing greater insight more than ever. While these insights won’t be fully clear until the third quarter, Williams has already picked up on some trends.

“I think you’re going to see people really lean into some of the behaviors we’re seeing including connected and OTT inventory really spiking,” Williams says. “Marketers are going to figure out how to use dynamic assets in those environments in a scalable way so that spend should pick up pretty quickly as well.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

According to a study by iSpot.tv, nearly 26% more brands, accounting for 1,247 more, are advertising on TV today in comparison to a year ago. According to an AdAge article on these findings, this spike could be from two main factors. The first being the disappearance of high-priced live-sports ad inventory, which has left networks with far more lower-priced inventory that’s affordable to a wider range of marketers. Secondly, networks have been working even since before the pandemic to expand accessibility to a wide range of marketers that competes with digital advertising packages from companies like Google and Facebook. This has been appealing to smaller brands.

VAB is noticing similar trends. Their close, six-week look has shown that there’s a surge across all demographics. While there is about a 20% uptick in viewing, there are different trends emerging. For example, teen viewing is up 35%, with a huge uptick in marketing opportunities coming in the middle of the day.

“You’re seeing a lot of pieces of unprecedented market physics where you’ve got audiences in scale that are connected and connected on multi screens and connected for multi hours during the day,” Cunningham says.

This has led to a redistribution of audiences, and genre and demographic boundaries have been broken. Marketers are taking advantage of these new trends of viewing in the age of COVID-19. With extra viewers and new viewing trends has come an increased measurement of scales of consumers.

Programmers are in constant conversation with their slate of advertisers because so many needed to redistribute their plans to address the inventory change. With sports programming and other tentpole live programming events being canceled, programmers are working hard to respond to the needs of advertisers, which has led to many firsts and changes of format within the industry.

“That has to do with the ability to truly partner with the advertisers to understand what these unique challenges are, help them do the type of messaging they need to do, get to the types of audiences they want to get to, and in doing that, you put new pages in the playbook.” Cunningham says.

One of the positives of this increased communication between programmers and advertisers is that it has reaffirmed the need for a large bulk-buying market that is driven by an advertisers needs. This may be remembered as a very different type of Upfront, but it is still based on something scalable, and a large scale at that.

“I think at the end of the day, clear-headed marketers and their great partners are finding a way to find how we make sure everyone can thrive through the new normal and then into something that is more like previous conditions.” Cunningham says.

All of that action presents an opportunity for Omnicom, which has been investing heavily in streaming and connected TV over the last few years, according to Sullivan.

“I only see that accelerating,” she tells Beet.TV during a remote BeetCam interview. “We’re excited about the opportunity to bring this all together, regardless of how a consumer is watching content. They have the ability to watch it linearly and digitally, and when you layer in behavioral targeting, that could be the holy grail in terms of getting linear to act more digitally and remove some of the friction.”

Omnicom works with Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising company, which is working with AMC Networks, Disney and WarnerMedia in a partnership announced in March to work toward a new linear buying and selling solution. Through that partnership, tools that Omnicom Media built with Xandr to facilitate more advanced linear targeting and measurement will be adopted by major media companies.

“They’ll be one asset for us to go push the envelope for demographic CPMs in the audience-based world,” says Sullivan of Omnicom’s work with Xandr. “Most media companies are finding new meaning, and understanding that in order to compete for the full funnel of dollars out there, they’re going to have to get into audience-based buying and targeting.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

Weeks ago, even before the US had truly taken action, an engineer made a call to action at Amobee to see what the company could do about it as an intermediary between multiple corners of the media. 

“We came up with a concept which is that we wanted to combat misinformation, starting in the U.S., that was out there regarding COVID-19 so that we could influence people to make the right decisions. With the right data, you can make the right decisions,” Laredo says. 

Inspired by an article in AdExchanger by industry friend Joshua Lowcock about the need for the industry to come together during the current crisis, Laredo connected with Lowcock and the partnership spread outward from there.

“One thing that drove all of us is that we, as technology [companies], as agencies, as advertisers, as broadcasters, have a responsibility to the population and that is to combat misinformation as well as to continue to invest in information that is truthful and support journalism on that front,” Laredo says. 

The goal that sprouted from there was to get in front of as many viewers as possible with accurate information. They kicked off the campaign by producing PSAs about getting factual information and targeted COVID content using Amobee’s brand intelligence tool. Within a week, they had agency partners, verification partners, publishers and SSP friends and more on board. Partners are UniversalMcCann, Publicis Media, Influential, OpenX, IAS, DoubleVerify, NewsGuard, eBay Advertising, AdColony, SpotX, Rubicon Project, True[X] and The Krim Group.

“We decided that we had to have a coalition because there were so many smart people,” Laredo says. “So many people who were aimed at making a difference and driving forward the truth that we had to take a pause and look at our strategy.”

The expansion has grown over the past few weeks. The coalition has served over 500 million impressions to 300 million individuals globally. Organizations involved, many of whom are competitors, have offered various ways to help. 

Laredo also spoke about news consumption and brand safety. Most companies’ first response to the pandemic was to ask, “What does this do to my company and what does this do to my brand?” According to Laredo, this led to a careful balance of advertisers not wanting to appear to be taking advantage of an unfortunate situation but also looking out for the best interests of their employees and organization at large. In order to deal with this, Laredo said that organizations should be concerned with brand suitability over brand safety. 

“Brand suitability really takes in brand values,” Laredo says. “And so things like news, where previously there may not have been a way to prevent you from sharing your brand on the same page as something about COVID-19, is that something that you really want to be avoiding as a brand safety measure versus something that has unsuitable content.”

As a result, there’s been a push to get advertising back on news, which is one of the goals of this coalition. 

“We are continuing as an industry to support the journalism that is essential during times like these and on an ongoing basis.” Laredo says.

Cadreon uses LiveRamp as a data source, and clients are using this data in a number of different ways. Many are using it to re-engage lapsed consumers or to increase the frequency of purchase from existing consumers. Others are utilizing data to build a lookalike model in order to extend the reach of an audience and find more that look like the best consumers and also sometimes to suppress consumers so that messages can be more controlled to them.

“I think that the most important aspect of addressable is that we have the ability to control frequency,” Hall says. “That’s critical, because as consumers, we want a good experience, and as a brand, we want to ensure that those consumers feel positively about our messaging and our brand. Therefore, controlling for frequency, especially across multiple channels, is critical.”

Hall believes that there needs to be some consumer education around value exchange. It’s up to the industry to inform them that in exchange for relevant advertising, they need to know more about why companies collect data and how they protect it.

“I believe that a full-fledged education is key,” Hall says. “Especially today as legislation like CCPA arrives and consumers read that legislation without truly being aware of that value exchange and what they’re getting as the exchange for their data.”

As far as this legislation, Hall is excited that the industry is in a position where they’re offering consumers transparency and can protect their data. It doesn’t come without its anxieties though. First, there’s a lack of understanding from the legislators and voting base on what the industry actually does with data and why they do it. Secondly, multiple states legislating on privacy is not tenable for companies to be able to comply with.

“We can’t expect that a company can operate efficiently and effectively to comply with fifty different policies,” Hall says. “My belief is that we strongly need a single voice and one policy that governs privacy across the United States.”

Hall feels confident, however, in the accuracy of Cadreon’s data sets. They gather it from Axium, so it is ethically sourced, privacy-compliant, and they can ensure that they’re messaging the intended audience.

“We’re in a good position from that standpoint,” Hall says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

“For some perspective, cookies were invented a long time ago for a different purpose. Advertising has piggybacked on top of that vehicle,” Metzer told Beet.TV’s Jon Watts in an interview at LiveRamp’s RampUp Summit. “Now that cookies are starting to disappear, and reliability is going away, different methodologies can be applied.”

Those methodologies largely rely on first-party data. “Understanding that engagement point with your consumer really creates a bridge into people-based marketing,” he says. From there, advertisers can build a model audience and target them.

At least in the short term, this methodology benefits large scale media outlets because they have the biggest pool of logged-in users from which they can collect first-party data. That should change within a year as the marketplace normalizes around the currency of addressable first-party data. Without the strategy of mixing first and third-party data, all companies will have to find new ways to model audiences off of first-party data alone.

During that transition period, fragmentation may present an issue, which Metzer says can only be confronted with try-and-repeat methods. But new methodologies won’t break the industry.

“It won’t shake up and break everything. Other models are being created,” he says. While there are more restrictions, there are also more dimensions to the strategy, namely more devices, formats, engagement and attention. “When you balance it all together we’re in a better spot.”

The most important next step is to understand the consumer and engage with them in a consented environment. But consent isn’t binary.

“What you want is high-quality consent, where the consumers understand why you need their data and what you’re doing with it,” says Metzer.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

Ad tech has been on the front end of that curve for some time now, but there has been a shift in the speed at which every industry and individual has had to adapt to this digitization, from food delivery and subscription services to streaming services.

“When you’re forced to make a choice between not having access or accessing these types of goods and services through a digital perspective, it changes the game,” Spiegel says.

As a result, Spiegel believes that the industry has fundamentally altered the trajectory of consumer behavior for both short and long term. Now that people have picked up these digital behaviors, they likely will not ditch them once the world returns to normal.

“I think the more that we demonstrate to people that you can interact in this digital way and more people get comfortable with it, it’s just going to stick,” Spiegel says. “And I think that has implications not just for the short term but for the long term as well.”

For digital companies like TransUnion, part of the leadership process right now is accepting that there are more unknowns than knowns, and being transparent and honest organization-wide. It also means being active in seeking out more information.

“For my section of the industry within TransUnion that means how do we get a handle on what does the ad spending look like over the next six to twelve months, what categories are clearly going to go dark and what categories might replace them?” Spiegel says. “What’s the impact of the fact that there are no big TV tenpole events right now and how does that impact how spending will change?”

It all comes down to prioritizing information and figuring out what the trends are going to be for the remainder of the year, and from there making product and market decisions based on those realities. Spiegel recommends that companies be “conscious capitalists” in the near future, not simply chasing the dollar at all costs but rather providing value to clients and partners in information, analysis, and assessment.

“There’s a marathon aspect to this and not a sprint,” Spiegel says. “We’ve got to do right by all constituents and that will, at the end, all work out.”

At the foundation of the response to a cookie-less future, consent and PII data are going to be important.

“You see some of the acquisitions happening where publishers are acquiring the programmatic platforms, the ad tech platforms, so they can have the full stack, and they can manage the people and the consent that they get on there,” Baudino says.

This will be important because these publishers are going to need to own it and know what regulations are coming next. Being proactive in this sense will make things like fragmentation within the industry less of a pressing issue. Being reactive to it, however, will make fragmentation harder to handle.

“You have to have that awareness and a plan for each market and what they’re going to do and be able to operate at data levels that fit each of those markets.” Baudino said. “As long as you have privacy as your foundation and how you build your data and your products and your capabilities, then you should be prepared to handle all situations.”

As far as growth opportunities for the next few years, Baudino believes that connecting digital data in the core marketing and connecting those two worlds together, using anonymous and known data, and connecting the insights that can be learned on both of those can help companies to more effectively market. Lastly, being able to do all of this globally will be a huge advantage.

“In the global markets, they’re going to accelerate their desire to be people-based, and you have to help educate them and understand what’s the investment and be able to give them a good, better, best approach, and consult.” Baudino said. “That’s what we’re finding—there’s a lot of consulting education still happening in the market, and if you’re willing to put in that effort, then you’re going to really support those brands and those platforms that want to listen.”

This video is part of  Beet.TV’s coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

There are a number of different data sources available now to help shape consumer intent. For eBay, consumer intent is pretty much built in. When someone comes to their site to buy something, it’s an act of intent.

“For us, we feel like we know who they are,” Kelliher says. “They’ve given us the right to work with them and to start teaching our advertising partners how people actually transact.”

While this data may be an inherent part of how eBay operates, Kelliher believes that no company will be able to survive going forward without a first-party data strategy. Companies need to understand what consumers are trying to get from their company in order to effectively advertise to them.

In the near future, Kelliher notices a trend of the walled gardens being built back up again, but he does not fear the prospect of an entirely walled ecosystem. He is wary, however, of a much more fragmented industry on the way.

“Understanding how the pieces come together and the ways that they work together are crucial for an advertiser.” Kelliher says.

He does not believe, however, that standardization is the solution.

“I think that there are layers of technologies that can sit in between and help get from point A to point B,” Kelliher says. “So we know at an absolutely granular level how many brands you consider when making a purchase, how many items you consider when making a purchase, what colors of items you’re looking at when making a purchase. There’s technology platforms that exist that can add that information to other types of behaviors, and that’s where one plus one can truly equal three for an advertiser.”

In the next few years, Kelliher expects to see increased consolidation, and those with unique first-party data will be successful. They’ll find ways to partner with agencies and clients in order to understand how consumers behave in a holistic environment.

“Those that are open to those conversations, and really the ones about, ‘let’s figure this out, I don’t need to make this actionable tomorrow, I need to figure out what this is going to be like a couple of years from now’ are the ones who are going to truly succeed.” Kelliher says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

Team Dayā started in November 2018 and has since raised over $100,000 from the advertising and tech industry. They completed construction of their first school in Dhayapur, Nepal, in February which is currently providing services to 165 students.

They have two additional schools slated for 2020, one in Malawi in East Africa which will be constructed this spring and then break ground for a school in Guatemala in the fall.

“We’re thinking a lot about 2021 and beyond in terms of both raising money but also starting to build some infrastructure for Team Dayā,” Sears says.

This includes finding out what kinds of industry events they could be plugging into, looking for fundraising mechanisms that are repeatable, and exploring how to recruit people to go on some school-building trips.

All contributions to Team Dayā go directly to their non-profit partner buildOn, and are 100 percent tax deductible.

“We raise money in a number of different ways, and we continue to get more creative in terms of how to do that,” Sears says.  Some of the largest contributors have been WideOrbit and The TradeDesk.

Team Dayā has a number of corporate sponsors including The Trade Desk and Wide Orbit, and the majority of support has come from executives across the advertising and technology industry. They have received over 300 individual donations so far.

Sears outlined three main ways to get involved with Team Dayā. First, those who would like to actively help can join a school building trip.

“It means that you get involved in the fundraising but you actually travel with Team Dayā to a place like Nepal or Malawi or Guatemala and you’re in the community side by side working with them on the initial groundbreaking of these schools, living with host families,” Sears says.

The second way is to make an individual or corporate donation, which people can do through their website. Lastly, people or companies can use a platform that they might have to help them tell the stories of building these schools.

“This is a massive story – it’s touching every single company and industry we cover across three brands,” says Morrissey in a remote interview via BeetCam. Digiday Media owns media and marketing publication Digiday, fashion and beauty publication Glossy and retail industry publication Modern Retail. “The actual editorial direction isn’t difficult – we put ourselves at the center of these industries. We connect people with the information they need to do their jobs better, and in a world of massive uncertainty that roles becomes even more important.”

There’s no shortage of business angles for reporters to explore right now; what’s important for an organization to do is keep up morale as companies continue working remote and some workers are dealing with an external crisis for the first time. “This situation is unique in a lot of ways, but we’ve been through the post 9/11, dot com bust and the financial crisis, and some others haven’t. It’s new, and it’s shocking.”

As companies work to make their ways through the crisis, advertising strategies are up in the air. Some have paused advertising spend all together as they figure out their messaging, Morrissey says, and some categories will be more resilient than others. More important than campaign angles, slogans or “how we’re dealing with coronavirus” emails is the actions companies take.

“One of the more interesting aspects is companies need to figure out what they can do to help during this time,” Morrissey says. “That will stick. Not all the tactical stuff about whether they put on ads.” Companies like LVMH turning over supply chains to hand sanitizer production leave an impression, similar to when Hyundai defer car payments after the 2008 financial crisis.

“That’s the kind of stuff that not only will it contribute to solving this problem but it’s actions and it’s not words,” Morrissey says. “A lot of advertising gets caught up in what the right words are when really what’s needed are the right actions. That’s what I’m looking for.”