This first appeared in the AdNews Annual 2020. Subscribe here to make sure you get your copy.
AdNews asked industry leaders their perspective on the year that was and the prospects for the road ahead:
Lou Barrett, managing director, national sales, News Corp Australia
This year really has been a year like no other in living memory. There isn’t anyone, across the world, who hasn’t been touched by the devastating impact of COVID-19. The human cost has been horrific, the economic and social impact devastating.
In the media and marketing sector, advertising budgets were slashed, events were cancelled, salaries were cut, and staff were furloughed or retrenched.
At News Corp, we quickly realised our clients needed our help, particularly in industries that were gutted by the pandemic, including travel. That meant investing in research to understand consumer changes — for example, The COVID Files and new Food Corp trends reports.
We then worked with clients to turn those insights into results through one-on-one sessions, industry roundtables and large virtual events such as The Road To Recovery and Decoded.
At the same time, we rolled out myriad editorial initiatives to keep people informed, entertained and educated. Those initiatives, coupled with the trust people place in our products, have led to strong readership, usage, engagement and sales growth across digital and print. Print also continued to deliver strong results for marketers. As Gerry Harvey said recently, Harvey Norman “put a huge amount of our (marketing) budget into print advertising and all of a sudden (our) sales went through the roof”.
What will 2021 bring in the media world? The confidence of marketers is starting to build, and the retail sector is looking solid. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge this year, driven by the recent boom in ecommerce and pent-up demand. The Christmas retail season will be bright and that should spill into next year.
The travel sector is starting to show signs of life and its marketing activity will continue to pick up. There is still a cloud over the live entertainment and cinema sectors, but in-home entertainment will continue to thrive. In other industries, the owners of big brands are starting to become more confident and prepared to spend on their brands in 2021.
This year has forced marketers to work a lot smarter with their ad spend. The events of 2020 have placed greater scrutiny on ROI and audience engagement. Moving into 2021, this will not change. The importance of audience attention, and the rise of the attention economy, will continue.
Marketers are increasingly realising they need to be able to capture and measure the attention of consumers. It’s no coincidence, then, that engagement and attention are underpinned by quality data. The looming death of third-party cookies means that marketers seeking this attention will need to further prioritise the importance of first-party data from premium media companies. With just 15 months to go before Google ditches third-party cookies entirely, the uptake of first-party data will increase sharply.
Capturing attention isn’t enough; you also need to keep it. Every marketing dollar counts, which means the quality of audience attention will also play a significant role in ad spending next year. Quality attention is built, in part, from audience engagement with trusted, premium media environments. Audiences’ trust in certain media outlets is a factor that cannot be underplayed by marketers as we move into next year.
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