1. Accounting for at-home<\/h2>\n

“Almost anyone that’s a CEO or a company leader that I’ve spoken with … definitely part of their plan going forward is to have some portion of their employee base work from home,” says Hulst. “So it’s going to be more important than ever to understand how your consumers are consuming media.”<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, marketers could use cookies, tiny text files stored on users’ devices, to track them. But cookies’ utility had been waning in the mobile era and had declined further because of the reality that most modern consumers now use multiple devices in multiple locations across the day.<\/p>\n

Gaining a holistic understanding of an individual user’s behavior has become the key imperative in marketing. Hulst thinks COVID-19 accelerates that.<\/p>\n

“That’s become even more important now because you have an accelerated transition to digital devices,” she says. “Think about people that weren’t interacting from a digital standpoint in large volumes before, they are all doing that now.<\/p>\n

“So it’s more important than ever as an advertiser, as a marketer, to know that you’re reaching your consumers with a consistent message … depending on if you’re reaching them on their phone or their laptop or through a streaming device.”<\/p>\n