COVID-19: Tracking the impact on media and consumer behavior

As we look toward a third year of living with COVID-19, savvy marketers know that meaningful, personal connections will be the key to long-term brand health. For that, they’ll need to focus on building and maintaining trust with their audiences—as well as which channels to leverage in those efforts.

While it’s important for brands to maintain balanced marketing strategies, marketers should be mindful of consumer sentiment as they allocate their media spending. For example, Nielsen’s 2021 Trust in Advertising study found that brand sponsorships are among the most trusted advertising sources among global consumers, yet most marketers don’t readily consider newer ad formats like brand integrations, sponsorships and product placements in their media planning. In fact, almost 34% of marketers surveyed for our 2021 Annual Marketing Report deemed these marketing formats as not important at all.

The word podcast was added to the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2005, but the term had yet to gain much traction in the media industry—as well as with the average consumer. Fast forward 16 years, and podcasting has blossomed into a burgeoning industry that provides brands with an opportunity to engage with a growing base of consumers that are very receptive to the engagement.

The transformation certainly didn’t happen overnight, but the rise in popularity of podcasts over the past six-plus years has effectively changed the landscape of the entire market. In addition to attracting rampant celebrity involvement and fueling original TV content, podcasts are attracting big ad dollars, with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) predicting that ad revenue will hit $2 billion by 2023, well above the $842 million generated last year.

In 2020, many companies sent their workforce home, some for the first time. Now, companies are re-configuring their offerings, office spaces and protocols partly because of the coronavirus and partly because of their workforces.

With much of the workforce having worked remotely for more than a year, employee priorities and values have changed. This has shifted where people live, what their home spaces look like, how they manage their daily schedules and what their media habits look like.

In mid-2020, while many in the U.S. were in lockdown, the social justice movement erupted across the country. The lockdowns created a captive audience for the movement and helped carry the story to many who were already consuming more news than usual. This increased awareness has also sparked companies to re-commit to inclusion and diversity, and more importantly, consumers are holding them accountable to those commitments.

As the pandemic continues to impact communities of color differently, directly or indirectly, brands can continue to see movement, but also backlash, as consumers grapple with their widely disparate views.