What should marketers get their procurement departments and auditors for Christmas?
Nine’s Richard Hunwick looks at the year that was and asks if a nexus, driven by both procurement and auditors, is attempting to drive media prices to a rate which will hobble marketers in 2021.
’Tis the season for giving and it’s fair to say that adland is having a merrier Christmas than many of us expected six months ago.
When you attempt to describe 2020 as a year, you can pretty much pick your cliché: “extraordinary”, “unprecedented”, “challenging” – they all apply. And they are all adjectives that in part describe a year where we discovered what would happen when marketers temporarily turned off their marketing spend, as COVID-19 shook confidence and supply suddenly dramatically outstripped demand (i.e. leading to a drop in price for much of the inventory in the market).
A lot has been written about this collapse in ad spend, but also about what the return in confidence has meant for brands and marketers who have rapidly moved to restore their marketing spend as various states come out of lockdown (with Melbourne the last to return to our “new COVID normal”). To me this has been one of the exciting lessons of COVID-19. For the first time ever, marketers have really tested what it’s like to (largely) turn off the tap of much of their day-to-day marketing spend and have clearly seen the real dollar value of their advertising investment.
Marketing is and always has been an investment, not a cost. Lost share of voice and brand awareness can quickly translate to lost real dollar sales for brand. The resurgence in brand advertising we have seen in recent months and weeks as we moved into the holiday season, particularly on television, clearly reflects an understanding that now is a time to return to fundamentals and drive not just short-term sales, but also the opportunity that COVID disruption has given shrewd marketers to capture market share for the medium and long-term.
