Pandemic or not, agencies are not about to stop flexing their creative muscles, many have put their talents to use for campaigns in direct response to Covid. Whether you’re looking for inspiration, want to know how the White House is reaching Americans, or just looking for cool things to do with your Zoom background, here are 7 of the latest and greatest agency initiatives we’ve seen from the ad world:

Don’t stop advertising in a downturn: the prescription is borne out by data from previous recessions. And some data shows that actually increasing advertising during a recession (assuming you have the resources) leads to significant business results long-term.

Let’s take a closer look at the data below, as well as your best alternatives to “going dark.”

As a marketer, how do you lead through a crisis? What do the best and leading marketers have to say about the current crisis, and what are they focusing on to get their teams through the current climate in the months ahead?

We scoured the internet to find what the top marketing leaders are saying, and compiled some of the best advice below. Here’s a breakdown of 10 pieces of advice from 10 different marketing leaders.

If you’ve kept tabs on advertising statistics over the last month, you already know that media buyers have decreased ad spend across the board. What you might not know is how many are responding strategically rather than stopping campaigns, and how media buyers are aligning to client goals.

We ran a survey of media buyers that use BriefBid platform. It answers the above questions, plus reveals some big potential opportunities around at least two under-used ad formats.

Let’s take a look.

The global lockdown has caused media prices to drop, but that hasn’t resulted in new campaigns for advertisers. While the new media buying opportunities arise, two culprits prevent investment in the heavily discounted CPMs experienced across the industry. Depending on the situation, marketers may be able to counteract at least one of them.

The two reasons why advertisers aren’t buying more media right now are:

• Overall slashed budgets
• Fears for brand safety

The coronavirus crisis continues to wreak havoc, with as many as 86% of advertisers anticipating anticipating major negative impacts to extend into Q2.

Moreover, those of us who still get to make decisions are facing make-it-or-break-it situations. As one chief media officer reports , we’re having to act a lot more decisively: “I tell [finance directors] what’s on a media plan that’s either muscle or fat. In other words, I have to tell those execs what’s going to work for the business now.” 

Those of us still serving clients agency-side are in the same boat: with a serious reduction in client budgets, it’s suddenly that much more important to demonstrate ROI.

Which is where the need to quickly find opportunities arises. So where are they?

Cost of news media plummets, new media buying opportunities emerge.

A significant gap opened up in news media publishing as advertisers stopped or paused campaigns.

IAB reports that 45% of news media publishers are now offering lower rates in an attempt to recoup some of the projected hits to the business. And the business hits will be serious indeed: 88% of publishers now expect to miss this year’s forecasts. 

But while publishers (news publishers especially) are losing ad revenue, their audiences are actually surging. For mid-April, SimilarWeb reports an 8.48% week-over-week gain in traffic to news websites. Meanwhile, Comscore’s aggregate data from 40 news sites showed 20% – 30% week-over-week traffic growth in March.

If online media’s CPMs are down across the board, yet audiences are actually more active online, advertisers have an opportunity to buy attention at a very heavy discount.

Some CPMs are discounted due to brand safety, and those discounts might not last.

It’s worth noting that if you’re dealing with massive budget cuts, you may simply not have the bandwidth for ad spend. The downturn has already impacted some of the largest marketing companies, and it’s no surprise that for some ad spend has simply taken a back seat.

However, where advertisers are pulling campaigns solely out of fear for brand safety, we may be witnessing a slight overreaction, and a real opportunity. Many advertisers have started to filter any and all news stories containing “coronavirus” keywords. It’s a common fear to have your brand associated with negative news stories. In March 2020, IAS blocked 1.36 billion ads — this is compared to just 64 million in February.

The problem here is that news publisher feeds have been completely dominated with stories related to the virus — it’s hard to imagine a credible news outlet that would be making different publishing decisions. By now, audiences throughout the entire globe have come to terms that this is a daily reality. So being overprotective about having a brand appear next to a story related to the virus may be causing more harm than good in the long run. As some publishers have noted: this is a time to adjust your messaging, not a time to stop advertising completely.

Of course, not everyone will take a forward-looking approach, and chances are that some advertisers will choose to be extremely safe. This is where the opportunity exists for those who can pivot quickly.

A comment from AdProfs put it well:

Until recently, media vendors and buyers had an unbeatable relationship-building tool: the trade show. Now it’s hard to tell how long we’ll wait before we get to participate in mass gatherings again.

But though trade shows are on pause, media vendors and buyers still need to build relationships — perhaps now more than ever. So how are businesses connecting in a post-trade-show world to fill the vacuum created by event cancellations throughout the globe?

Let’s start by taking a look at exactly why trade shows were so impactful in the first place…