Before you stop your campaigns, think ahead

With the arrival of the COVID-19 “black swan” we are living an unparalleled moment. In Europe we are barely dealing with how to adapt to the new situation with the first indisputable objective of reducing infection rates and taking care of the health of our loved ones.

The information overdose is overwhelming and psychologists recommend intermittently disconnecting from this flow to reduce anxiety levels. But we must not allow fear to take center stage and lead us to inactivity.

The socioeconomic implications of this pandemic are difficult to forecast, mainly due to the lack of certainty regarding when we will return to a new “normality”, considering possible outbreaks of modified versions of the virus.

From the papers in circulation, it is clear that we are facing disruption in the supply chain of important manufacturing sectors as a result of the halt of the China factory. This has already led to a gradual reduction in demand due to the impossibility of finalising the manufacture of the final product in Europe due to lack of parts and now due to the temporary closure of factories in our territory.

This process is now aggravated in our geography with the closure and confinement of many of our cities generating an immediate brake on consumption and an increase in preventive savings.

Fortunately, the latest news point to a drastic reduction in infections in China, but the geographic fragmentation of suppliers and their distance in shipping to factories in Europe, implies that it may well take months to return to normal.

Companies have started with their contingency plans and relevant aid packages are being prepared from the EU to facilitate government liquidity in health matters but also in support of SMEs and in promoting consumption.

Unfortunately, the growing lack of cohesion in our continent in terms of political and economic alignment weighs heavily on our ability to be agile and seek maximum synergies in our ability to make them effective locally; but we will do well to study them and see their applicability as soon as possible.

A clear example of lack of cohesion is the disparity in the strategy of dealing with the virus, with Boris Johnson's Great Britain focused on staying “open for trade” as long as possible, under the theory that it will generate an “immune herd” effect of infected that makes a significant proportion of its citizens build a more resilient immunity to future possible mutations of the virus, to the strategy of Italy, Spain, Brussels, France and Norway of "immediate lock-down"

It remains to be seen the effectiveness of the UK strategy, but thinking in the medium term is increasingly important when we have become accustomed to focusing so much on the short.

We must act proactively as entrepreneurs, business managers and citizens to deal more effectively and thus minimize the economic impact in the medium term.

One of the areas of action with a strong impact on our economies is advertising, where media investment is a powerful lever that is being evaluated by advertisers and where important decisions will be made starting this week.

A clear result of the confinement of families in Europe is a significant increase in the consumption of media, both in order to keep up with the latest and to distract us.

Television consumption in homes with children have jumped up compared to Tuesday last week and the rise in audience is widespread throughout all age ranges.

Similarly, internet consumption has of course intensified with first peaks of + 30% that will undoubtedly continue to grow.

This confluence of the attention of audiences of all age ranges is a phenomenon that will accompany us during the coming weeks and months that has not occurred for decades when media consumption was highly concentrated.

That is why the main brands active in our region should carefully weigh their communication and media strategy before taking the simple solution to stop or significantly cut campaigns.

It is indisputable that most businesses have a component of person-to-person interaction in their sales process, including digital pure-players that also often work under a scale model where margins are tight and a slowdown in activity makes them particularly vulnerable.

However, regardless of the decisions that the business exposure has to the disruption in the global supply chain and the ability to stay “open for business” in terms of campaigns that seek immediate sales, the current situation opens up a genuine opportunity to forge deeper relationships with customers and consumers, increasingly distant from brands, based. on authentic social value, bearing in mind of this phenomenon of confluence of audiences.

I am not arguing for opportunism, but about the importance of maintaining an ecosystem of brands that are as strong as possible, maintaining jobs in the medium term and in turn help us continue financing multi-angular, truthful and verified information from the media that are largely financed from advertising.

The fundamental thing is to understand the role that each brand can offer in the current context, leveraged by the highest purpose that each company is exploring as "reason for being" and offer consumers a brand service of real utility for the new reality in which we will live in for a while.

Recent examples are the effort of hotels chains offering their rooms for lighter patients free of charge, or telecom operators offering bandwidth and free content to their clients.

However, brands must be brave, and not only focus on communication that have a PR effect, but also seek to connect in a more sustained way, taking advantage of the fact that the confluence in audiences enables the concurrence of message reception by all members of the family unit in a moment of generation of new "rituals", increasing the digital word of mouth with new mechanics, such as the generation of collective hangouts, powered by whatsapp when we search for social interaction.

It is indeed a chance for advertisers to generate a more “immune” brand system, thanks to the strengthening of brand equity and to emerge from this crisis reinforced so that performance campaigns that work the lower-funnel can work more effectively as the demand returns, which bear no doubt, will definitely be the case.

Thinking about a system is quite relevant, since we do not know if we will face new outbreaks and of course speaking of brand equity, it is all about connecting with the cultural fiber and emotional feeling of consumers, leveraging the ability of technology to capture the confluence.

The human factor, being already vital in an environment of technological "backlash", becomes even more critical at a time when, as citizens who see our freedoms restricted by an element of force majeure, yearn for physical human interaction and closeness.

This is where brand role, creative idea and technology meet through data. Accompanying your mass media campaign with a powerful programmatic strategy on desktop and mobile supported by a minimum capacity of CDP or DMP can be a very powerful stack if you know how to assemble it quickly or with the help of your agency and it does not have to be more complicated than what we make it to.

Let's take advantage of the productivity that remote work makes possible for all the necessary parts of the chain, let's be brave and put our minds to work positively.