Business

As 2019 was a great year for media sales, many sales managers were expecting similar revenue growth in 2020, not including political ad estimates. And then coronavirus arrived. Over the past two months, revenue has dramatic hit. Many sales managers are expecting to see up to a 50% drop in revenue.  In this COVID-19 Special Report media sales managers share their thought about the current state of media sales. And it’s not all doom and gloom! Many are optimistic about the economic recovery awaiting the country in coming months.

The latest insights from Comscore show that while certain retail categories saw significant decreases in visitation and consumer spending, overall spending and visitation to online retail increased across desktop and mobile in March 2020 compared to March 2019.

What trends and best practices should shared services and functional leaders be considering as they think about the evolution of their operating model? What role might global business services constructs play in enabling digital transformation across the enterprise?

Spring is here in DC.  Still some cool days, but progressively it is looking and feeling like summer.  People are anxious—they are increasingly going out, but still are fearful of the external COVID-19 world.  And America is, well, America—completely disorganized and decentralized politically.

Marketers are pretty intimate with content marketing metrics, data, and analytics these days—and if you’re not, you’d best get learning.  By Lauren McMenemy

A large majority (75 percent) of ANA members have strategic plans in place to hire suppliers with diverse backgrounds for their overall organizations, but only 40 percent have such strategies specifically for marketing and advertising services.  Those are two of the key findings in a new ANA study, “The Power of Supplier Diversity,” which also revealed that among those with a supplier diversity strategy, the top segments targeted are women-owned (98 percent), ethnic/minority-owned (95 percent), veteran-owned (90 percent), LGBTQ-owned (88 percent), and disability-owned (80 percent).

BOTTOM LINE: Following the onset of Covid-19, it has not been surprising to see the strength in eCommerce, but what has caught us by greater surprise has been the boon lower priced media – particularly on FB – has been toward that acceleration. We have spoken to several agencies that are focused on the DTC-native eCommerce segment. Their advertisers indicated that beginning early/mid April, they were seeing multiple successive days of record spend at prices down 30-40% post-Covid vs pre-Covid. Beyond the benefits of lower eCPMs, this has been accompanied by higher conversion rates as well – driving record ROAS for this cohort of advertisers. We have not touched base with any gaming advertisers, but based on FB’s comments on their 1Q20 eps call, suspect this is likely driving a further boom. Notably, we have heard about pricing increases though early May on FB in the HSD/LDD range, though pacing still well below pre-Covid 19 levels. Our interpretation is this is more a reflection of firming up of the auction at FB, though it is having a slight negative impact on this cohorts’ ROAS.