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Covid-19 in Advertising and DRTV

By: Justin Curry/Collette Liantonio

The national impact of Covid-19 has devastated every sector of the economy.   DRTV and performance based marketing efforts are no exception.  Although media rates are down,  and viewership is greater than ever, there are problems with the supply chain and the logistics of  empty call centers and fulfillment centers..  And of course filming has come to a screeching halt.

In a recent article titled, “17.9 Billion Reasons Consumer-Response TV Advertising is Here to Stay”, written by Joseph Gray, it explains how much money was put into national ad spending last year for TV commercials and how that number is drastically declining currently due to Covid-19.  “Last year was another year of growth for the industry. That said, we’re definitely seeing an overall decline in recent weeks due to Covid-19. While we expect to see a downturn overall in advertising expenditures for 2020, we are seeing sectors of the industry actually increasing spend during this time.” (Gray, 2020)

Generally, this is a huge loss for the advertising industry.

According to the “National Television Direct-to-Consumer Advertising Units by Day” chart, founded by Ad Sphere, it shows the exact statistics of how different advertising revenue have been fluctuating since the beginning of Covid-19, such as Web, Mobile, SMS, Lead Generation, Vanity 800, Short Form Products and Infomercials.  All this show more of a decrease in their advertising more than an increase, with some showing drastic changes daily.  For example, the Lead Generation section shows huge decreases from a 5%-20% range every week.  Sadly, every advertising department is seeing a decrease in their revenue due to the Covid-19 situation.

General advertising and DRTV are taking a huge hit from Covid-19 .  Hopefully when all this ends, advertisers will be able to produce new content quickly.  The creative directors and advertisers are using this time wisely to ramp up their DRTV strategies and video pre-production creative efforts so they can launch new campaigns smoothly when life returns to the new normal.

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