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

In a sign of the long-feared economic slowdown coming to pass, third-party revenue platforms for publishers are quietly revamping their payment processes.

Sources say that Altice-owned monetization platform Teads has spent the last week notifying publishers that its earlier revenue guarantees may not materialize, while fellow ad-tech company GumGum has proposed extended payment terms.

Although ecommerce provides an opportunity to make sales despite store closures, some brands are shelving their online platforms as well, whether to remain true to a brand’s core values or because of a snag in operations.

Patagonia and TJX Companies, which own and operates brands including TJ Maxx and Marshalls, have all closed their brick-and-mortar as well as online ecommerce platforms. Victoria’s Secret closed its online shop earlier this week, but restarted its operations a few days later.

“This is honestly a level of insanity that I’ve never seen before,” said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester.

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai detailed a commitment of more than $800 million to support small and midsized businesses, health organizations, governments and health workers on the front lines during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Pichai said in a blog post Friday that $250 million in ad grants will go to the World Health Organization and more than 100 government agencies worldwide to help them share critical information on preventing the spread of Covid-19 and other ways to help local communities.

Apple has positioned itself as a champion of user privacy, and this week it announced the full blocking of third-party cookies in its web browser Safari, two years ahead of rival offering Google Chrome.

It’s the latest move in the rollout of its intelligent tracking prevention plan, and closes earlier loopholes in Apple’s cross-site tracking policies and will cause publishers further difficulty in monetizing Safari users.

For the American Olympic brand partners, the postponement ultimately means a change in plans, and undoubtedly several headaches, but the delay offers the promise of a games that are even more compelling than usual.

“The Olympic games being pushed into 2021 will become a beacon for the world,” said Rob Prazmark, the president and CEO of 21 Marketing, a sports and entertainment marketing company. “The world came together to fight this virus and now the world is coming together to celebrate humanity.”

Facebook said it has directed more than 1 billion people to Covid-19 resources from health authorities, including the World Health Organization, and over 100 million of those people clicked through to learn more.

The continuing COVID-19 outbreak means a less-than-rosy outlook for media owners’ net advertising revenue forecasts. Media suppliers’ total linear ad sales, previously expected to hold steady this year, are now projected to decline by nearly 12% in 2020, according to a revised ad forecast from the IPG Mediabrands-owned Magna Global. Full-year ad sales are expected to drop by 2.8% across all media, when they had previously expected to grow nearly 7%.

The impact will be most severe for print media, which is expected to be hit with a 25% loss in advertising sales in 2020 compared to the previously forecast 17% decline.