How are user and advertiser behaviours changing right now? Resources for the programmatic & biddable media industry.

The past couple weeks have been a surreal time for me as a marketer, no less a human in general. Working at an agency means staying ahead of the curve on behalf of our clients. I wanted to share some useful links and stats while they are still recent enough to be interesting. 

According to a report by eConsultancy on 26 March, 60% of brand marketers said they were delaying or reviewing budget commitments.  But this Kantar survey of 35,000 consumers globally reported that only 8% thought brands should stop advertising. In the b2c space, this can present opportunities for brands. Agencies play the important role of communicating this back to clients with supporting stats and facts.

Encore operates primarily in the b2b space, so a lot of my focus has been on understanding employees and employers in this strange, new world. This Forbes article suggests b2b marketers will be more reliant than ever on their digital strategy. Live events, conferences and even f2f sales meetings are off the table for now. What could be better than to make further investment in digital channels? I have to say I agree here. 

Whether you are a b2b or b2c advertiser, if you can afford it right now then the long-term benefits of brand building are sure to pay off. Less competition means it is easier to increase share of voice, market share, and ultimately profit.  

Looking channel specific, paid social channels have shared some solid material on what people are thinking and talking about online.  

LinkedIn shared this article discussing trending content on their platform over the past month. The biggest topics of discussion were perspectives and advice on remote working, social distancing, crisis management, business continuity, online learning and collaborating. Remote working searches on LI tripled in March, the platform says. 

Twitter posted this blog around how brands should communicate right now. It brings up some solid points about the importance of staying current, knowing your brand and understanding what your customers or employees need right now (with some good b2b and b2c examples included). Also included are some stats about Tweet posting, frequency and hasthags. 

Ad tech players Captify and Pubmatic have shared infographics that are specific to advertising verticals and content categories. Spoiler alert: Travel is down and EVERYONE is glued to the News. And although it may be a natural reaction for our clients to want to take extreme measures with negative keyword block lists, Encore use solutions like Oracle's Contextual Intelligence to create advanced keyword segments that take advantage of traffic spikes whilst ensuring ad placement is still brand safe.  

Lastly I did a bit of my own data analysis by running an Inventory Availability report in Google’s DV360 to understand how online user behaviour is changing. Looking at a forecast against the US, UK, DE, FR, ES and IT, we observed that the Sum of Potential Impressions from our major ad exchanges increased by 16% when comparing the 1st of March to the 26th. This trend was also consistent across devices. At least from an Encore perspective, there’s never been a better time to advertise programmatically. 

So what can we expect in terms of how the current situation will impact ad spend? The IAB US published this report last week on how the buy-side may be impacted. For more than a third (35%) of advertisers adjusting in-market tactics, 38% said they are increasing audience targeting efforts. Echoing this point, we feel that biddable activity which allows for more precision and less wastage is the safest way forward.  

I hope this info is informative, maintains optimism in uncertain times, and saves you time Googling - - If you have any information to share back with me then please do!