How media sales teams are navigating the new world order

“It’s definitely not business as usual,” said Guy Griggs, executive advertising director at The New York Times. “We have a box at the Garden, at Barclays, where we had concerts scheduled [to attend] for the next two weeks. That softer sell—look, a lot of business happens in those soft times, where you find an insight or brainstorm idea—those things wouldn’t come up on a video call.”</span

Amobee and Universal McCann are spurring an initiative to buy digital ad space to fill units with public service announcements around coronavirus.

They've come together as publishers are being hit by rampant keyword blocking around the virus and other terms associated with it.

The rate in which readers are consuming coronavirus coverage has led to some record-shattering page views for media organizations, at least according to Parse.ly.

Media execs aren’t exactly eager these days to talk about how they’re planning to profit on the one topic that seemed to grind the news cycle to a screeching halt. Publishers say these page views are leading to an increase in subscriptions, which is good news for the handful that put their journalism behind paywalls, particularly in the last couple of years.

Media companies have begun to formulate their short-term ad sales strategies, with Disney becoming the first to publicly share its plans. They include pointing its live sports advertisers to other programming in its portfolio, including Good Morning America and its Freeform original series.

Disney ad sales chief Rita Ferro sent a note to clients on Tuesday, which Disney Ad Sales shared today, updating them on the company’s efforts on helping advertisers find alternatives for their live sports ad buys.

The new streaming service's special hasn't yet gone into production

Whether it’s because of self-isolation, quarantines or social distancing efforts, many Americans are stuck at home over nationwide efforts to limit the coronavirus’ spread. Streaming services of all sizes are looking to win them over by speeding up the release dates of new shows and movies, offering up extended free trials and encouraging binge-watching programming.

Facebook blamed a glitch in its automated systems that filter out spam for a host of complaints Tuesday night about posts on topics including the coronavirus being removed despite not violating its terms of service.

Users of the social network turned to Facebook and Twitter to complain about the erroneous removals of posts, many of which referenced COVID-19 or contained links to legitimate news sources.