Hey everyone,
Josh, here. Hope you're feeling healthy.
As the land shakes beneath us, we're starting to see where the cracks are opening. The biggest chasm, unsurprisingly, is revenue.
Trade bodies, like Digital Content Next, send letters to the ad verification industry asking them to change its default setting to exempt news sites from when blocking coronavirus-related stories. Every penny counts.
One sales rep at a large news organization told me, "Doubleverify is flagging that we have a lot of unsafe impressions being served, because any advertisers with take-overs on section fronts...are being flagged unsafe if one of the articles is about [coronavirus]; which in every section of the site there are articles about the virus. From sports to entertainment to health to cooking."
Additionally, this rep told me that if any blocked coronavirus term (e.g "Covid") is in the URL, that gets flagged as 'unsafe,' too.
"It's an undeniable, huge factor in culture; so there may be a reference to it in all sections," the sales rep said. "So...we'll do our best in not having them around the 'hard news' coverage of CV-19; but we can't completely block everything without just pausing the campaign."
This type of discussion matters because, as Kantar noted, people self-isolating aren't spending as much money on products. And if they're not spending money (while at the same time companies aren't producing products), companies don't spend on advertising.
Indeed, Magna said last week that the effect of the coronavirus on media has flipped the prediction from an expected ad revenue growth of nearly 7% to a 2.8% drop across all media.
The Captain Obvious analysis: publishers aren't making money from advertising. Gross oversimplification, sure. But in the media supply chain, publishers are at the bottom of the hill.
The revenue chasm is a yawning one. Another hole in the ground? Operations. Media companies are trying to figure out how to change on a dime, like Sports Illustrated, which, publishing editor Sara Jerde reported, needed to put out an issue even though the very thing it covers—sports—has been postponed.
Media companies also need to pay close attention to their partners. On Friday, my colleague Ronan Shields reported that monetization platform Teads is contacting clients informing them that they are invoking Force Majeure on earlier revenue guarantees. GumGum, too, he reported, changed its payout from a Net 60 to a Net 90 while SSPs are beginning to tighten their belts.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, if you will. We're only three weeks into this. What this looks like in three more weeks or three months, no one knows. What we do know is that all these cracks that are being exposed need to be fixed.
If not, this industry, a foundational one to our republic, will not survive. The layoffs and adjustments are already happening.
If you're a media company and you've had these discussions with your ad partners; if you're an agency and you've had these discussions with your clients, let me know. I'd like to hear what you're talking about.
Have a great week. Be well, be safe, be smart.
Josh Sternberg
Media and Tech Editor, Adweek