Data-Labor-Technology

However, each subsequent month has seen a growth in ad spending, notably in paid search, which nearly doubled traffic from May to June, according to SimilarWeb cited by Roast. And while ad spending in travel is still far below pre-pandemic levels, according to four travel experts interviewed for this article, it has been slowly on the rise since May when countries like Italy, Spain and Estonia outlined plans to restart tourism. 

Between Mat 20 and June 20, ad spending across Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the U.K. was up 6.3% on the previous month, according to Nielsen. It may be only a fraction (16.2%) of what advertisers spent in January, but the increase suggests advertisers are getting more confident in their ability to salvage some sales over the summer. 

“We’re still generally seeing a very soft advertising and media market. said Alessandra Di Lorenzo, CEO of Forward, the media business of the online travel site Lastminute.com.

Consequently, the main travel advertisers that buy ads from Forward’s Display Open Marketplace are not back to the levels they were in terms of spending, which is causing weakened demand pressure that’s unable to drive up the price of ads that are “very soft” compared to last year, said Di Lorenzo. Still, she added: “As the positive trend of the online travel agency volumes increases, things are starting to improve with week-over-week growth across our audience and display publisher portfolio.”

Reaching those customers is not without its challenges as they emerge from lockdowns as different types of travelers than they were before the pandemic began.

Shorter booking windows, flexible policies, competitive pricing, stricter health screening measures and mobile bookings are some of the trends emerging from the lockdown. There’s also the mindset of would-be travelers to consider. The pandemic has been a time for reflection and many people are choosing to do things that they would’ve usually put off and are therefore choosing to do things that may be closer to home — a trend that Scotland’s tourism board VisitScotland has tried to tap into in recent weeks.  

“Our strategy, therefore, sought to support the businesses in tourism and therefore the wider economy as well as providing the positive wellbeing benefits that visitors were seeking,” said Stuart Randall, head of strategy at VisitScotland’s creative agency Whitespace. “We also wanted to feature the people behind Scottish tourism to add warmth and a sense of connection all with the scenic backdrop and warm welcome that Scotland is famed for.”

It is, however, unlikely that travel and tourism will fully recover in 2020. Not when people are still worried about their safety.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of adults across Great Britain would not feel safe traveling by plane currently, up from 40% on 8. June, according to a recent 1,612 person survey by YouGov. There is a similar unease about other types of international transport. Over half of those surveyed (55%) say they’d feel unsafe traveling by train, while 48% would not feel comfortable on a ferry. In both cases, this is a substantial jump from 31% on June 8 for both modes of travel.

“Content is shifting in response,” said James Calvert, chief data strategy officer at M&C Saatchi. “If marketers don’t feel like they can sell someone a holiday right now, then they’re trying to find ways to inspire them for when they do decide to go.”

Still, advertisers in the sector are mindful of how much demand they stoke while social distancing measures are enforced. Airlines, train operators and coach companies have seen their capacity dramatically cut as their costs are likely to increase. Little wonder then why most advertisers are prioritizing the low hanging fruit of targeting those people they know who do want to travel. Usually, advertisers would have chased prospective customers. 

“The key focus for travel marketers right now is making sure people who are in the market for a holiday convert with your brand, whether you already know them through as a previous customer or via some lead generation activity, said Alastair Poole, account director at media agency Incubeta. Retargeting, particularly on social networks like Facebook, has been a crutch for many of these advertisers that are looking to reach as many people as they can with targeted ads.

Between March and April, Facebook ad spending from travel advertisers across Italy, France, Germany and the U.K. dipped from $11.5 million to $3.8 million, according to Pathmatics. Since then ad spending has risen and hovered at $9.5 million for the first 21 days of July. 

It will take some time for ad spending to fully recover in travel. Given how volatile the situation is, no advertiser wants to spend lots of money chasing sales when the rules of traveling may change.

“I don’t see many travel advertisers back on TV yet,” said Calvert. “Everyone is still wary. A lot of the companies in the sector are running reduced services and with those reductions come lower expectations. They’re more focused on the customer base they can go back to and talk to at the moment.”

Clean.io, a company that offers malvertising protection to publishers, found that automotive publishers had the highest measure of its “global threat level” — a percentage calculation of the number of threats clean.io blocked divided by the number of pageviews it behaviorally analyzed — between April and June. A blended average of 0.28% of all automotive publisher pageviews Clean.io analyzed in the period were impacted by malicious ads. The single-day peak threat level for the category was 8.85%.

Clean.io estimated that on the worst-impacted days in the quarter, automotive sites without adequate ad fraud prevention could have lost 9% of their pageviews as user sessions were hijacked by redirects and illicit full-page takeover ads. 

Automotive publishers were likely hardest hit because they saw a shortfall in ad revenue as disruption to manufacturing and fewer visits to dealerships led carmakers to slam the brakes on their digital advertising. 

Overall, the level of malvertising observed across the 7 million websites and apps Clean.io analyzed “ebbed and flowed with with what we [saw] with [advertising] demand patterns throughout the quarter,” said Matt Gillis, Clean.io CEO. While the threat level was at its height at the beginning of April, it began petering out towards the end of May and June. That tallies the overall digital ad spending trends over the period: For most publishers, April was the bottom and revenue began ticking upwards again month-on-month in May and June. 

The next most-affected group of publishers were in the education category. A blended average of 0.27% of pageviews were affected by malvertising in the quarter. The single-day peak threat level was 2.86%. In this case, Clean.io said education publishers were likely hit due to receiving huge spikes in traffic as people adjusted to the new homeschooling environment. 

News sites were 20 times less likely to carry malvertising versus automotive and education sites, primarily because they are stricter about how they apply their price floors and have stricter ad-category blocks, according to Clean.io.

The majority of the malvertising occurred on mobile browsers, which is favored by fraudsters because they can take over the entire screen and masquerade as a landing page for a legitimate brand — such as an Amazon page or credit card company form — to encourage users to type in their personal information. 

“That’s the reason we think mobile is the platform of choice. It’s the same reason interstitials are a good way to get people to download an application,” Gillis said.

Chrome, which commands two-thirds of the global browser market, had the biggest share of attacks in the quarter at around 36% combined across its mobile and desktop browser. Perhaps more surprisingly, Facebook’s browser, embedded within its app, had the second largest share of attacks at 29% during the period analyzed. Malvertising issues inside the Facebook browser can be harder for publishers to troubleshoot and reproduce because it is one layer removed from the usual browser experience, Gillis said.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Catching the criminals isn’t easy as they use sophisticated methods to avoid detection, including using a wide range of demand-side platforms and resellers to carry out their attacks. In the second quarter, Clean.io observed that the bad actors also rotated around more than 60 supply-side platforms, both large and small.

A spokesman for PubMatic said the company had seen a 100-200% increase in malvertising ads between March and June. However, the spokesperson added, the company had technology and 24-hour monitoring in place to protect publishers.

“Fortunately, we have restrictive bidding in place for most of our publishers. This means we only include good creatives in auctions and exclude those awaiting classification,” said the spokesperson.

A spokesperson for OpenX said they hadn’t witnessed a rise in the number of malvertising cases between last quarter and the beginning of this year.

“It’s been standard practice at OpenX to scan 100% of the ads that run through our exchange with multiple third-party malware detection platforms and to rescan all ad creatives based on risk assessment to ensure our publisher partners, and their users, are protected from bad ads,” the spokesperson added.

OpenX is also a participant of TAG’s Threat Sharing Group, which enables sharing of details on malware issues across DSPs and SSPs, the spokesperson said.

“We’ve always invested in and prioritized solutions that guarantee a protected and secure exchange, and as part of these efforts, have a working relationship with Clean.io to ensure we can be 100% confident the path to our supply is protected,” said an Index Exchange spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Magnite did not reply to a request for comment in time for publication,

Matt Cannon, chief operating officer of Venatus Media, a publisher monetization partner that works with clients in the gaming and entertainment industries, said SSPs do care about malvertising issues, but it can often be low priority. Venatus is a client of Clean.io.

“One of the biggest challenges is that the very nature of the dynamic of DSPs and SSPs and the way everything works means there’s no financial incentive for the demand side or the SSP pipes to proactively do something to fix this,” said Cannon. “It’s incredibly frustrating.”

The startup’s return to television is one signal that the battered wedding industry is beginning to see signs of life.

“Recently we’ve noticed a significant shift where couples are feeling much more confident and comfortable planning,” said Mike Chi, chief marketing officer of Zola. “The majority of couples with dates in the summer are moving forward with at least their ceremony, and overall weddings are starting to resume.” 

All told, Zola ads weren’t running on streaming platforms or on TV from April to June. Typically, 25% to 40% of Zola’s media budget is allocated to streaming and TV. In 2019, Zola spent approximately $14.9 million on media, according to Kantar, which doesn’t track social ad spending.

The startup has not returned to streaming and TV with that level of spending yet; currently spending roughly one fourth of what it typically would during wedding season on advertising (the company declined share how much that would be).

“There is a shift to co-viewing where people are streaming together [because of coronavirus],” said Chi of the changing behavior of couples that helped the company decide to get back on streaming and TV.

Chi continued: “The ultimate decision makers are tuning in with their other family members or their partner who they are quarantined with, which is extremely relevant for a wedding business. This means there is a more immediate cycle between viewing and purchasing or signing up for a service. This also means that programs have wider demographics than they did previously.” 

The new ads are meant to appeal to that broader audience. They show couples that it’s easy to plan a wedding virtually, even from your couch and that it’s possible to quickly send out “change the date” cards if the wedding needs to be postponed for some reason. 

That said, streaming and TV ads can only go so far for Zola. “We’re leaning on our couples to let us know when they are ready to plan, and so the majority of our spend is focused on ‘hand raiser’ channels like search where couples are actively planning,” said Chi. “For that reason the amount of our allocation towards TV is down.” 

With search, Zola is experimenting with new search terms like “micro-wedding” and “virtual wedding” to garner traffic from couples still planning or starting to plan weddings. 

As some states go back into lockdown due to the coronavirus, Zola may again tweak its approach to advertising to deal with that.

“Our strategy is always based on meeting couples where they are,” said Chi. “We can’t predict what will happen with the pandemic, but no matter what we’re going to continue to offer flexible services for our couples.”

Advertisers would likely handle a second sports hiatus differently than they did the first. When major sports paused or postponed their seasons in March, most advertisers sat on the money they had set aside and waited to spend it once games resumed. This time around, however, advertisers would be more likely to spend that money in order to accelerate their businesses’ recovery. The only issue is that the broader TV ad market, including streaming services and digital video platforms, may be unable to completely accommodate such a deluge of demand, based on interviews with five agency executives.

“There is no real replacement [for live sports]. I wish there was, that we could say it’s YouTube. But there isn’t for sports. At the level of the NFL, you have tens of milllions of viewers simultaneously for three hours. There’s no place in media you can recreate that,” said the agency executive.

The broad reach over an extended time that live sports offers advertisers is why companies cumulatively spend billions of dollars to air campaigns within major sports leagues’ games. Advertisers collectively spent $4.6 billion to advertise during the NFL’s most recent season alone, according to data from Kantar Media. Meanwhile, the most recent full seasons of the NBA, NHL and MLB combined attracted $2 billion, per the media measurement firm.

Under pressure

In a worst-case scenario where all major sports leagues call timeout because of the continuing coronavirus crisis, that money is unlikely to sit in advertisers’ bank accounts — at least so long as they can help it.

Not only are advertisers pressed to make up for the business they likely lost in the initial months of the crisis, but they are also under pressure to make sure they hit their sales numbers in the third and fourth quarters. Additionally, some advertisers postponed product launches and corresponding campaigns until the fall in hopes that the crisis would subside and tentpole events like sports would return.

“It’s a little bit different than March when it wasn’t just sports was shut down but everything was shut down. Now it feels like businesses will be open to some extent, but they can’t rely on sports to be their megaphone,” said a second agency executive.

That would leave ad buyers and ad sellers seeking out alternative homes for the billions of ad dollars left in limbo if there’s another sports hiatus.

TV alternatives

The first alternative for advertisers to redirect their dollars would be TV networks’ other programming.

Network groups, such as Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS, would be able to point advertisers to their broader portfolios, such as their broadcast networks’ prime-time shows as well as their cable news and entertainment networks. However, some advertisers are already wary of appearing within news shows, and agency executives said that will only increase as the U.S. presidential election nears in November and political coverage accounts for a larger share of news broadcasts. Meanwhile, the production shutdown has thrown into question whether networks will have enough new programming to attract large enough audiences.

“We would love to go back to Warner or Disney, but in some cases they might not be able to take it in capacity because sports generates higher ratings,” said a third agency executive. 

“M*A*S*H isn’t on anymore, so it’s not like there are shows that are going to just absorb it,” said the second agency executive.

As a result, advertisers and their agencies would likely ask to invoke the clauses typically included in their contracts with networks that allow them to get out of deals when the programming they purchased ads against doesn’t air.

“Clients have been waiting for so long with these dollars held hostage almost, so how could you keep holding them?” said a fourth agency executive.

Streaming steps in

So where would ad dollars go if not to other TV programming? Streaming, say agency executives, citing the streaming viewership surge since March and the shift in ad dollars is already underway. Redirecting dollars to streaming could keep some of that money with the TV networks that have established ad-supported streaming footprints, such as Disney, which owns Hulu; ViacomCBS, which owns Pluto TV and CBS All Access; and Fox, which owns Tubi. “Normally we try to reexpress dollars with the media owner wherever it makes sense for the client,” said a fifth agency executive.

However, there may be limits on how much advertiser demand the networks’ streaming properties would be able to accommodate. “We might not be able to take $10 million of NBA and reinvest all of it into Hulu,” said the third agency executive. 

Of course, there are plenty of other options. Other streaming services would vie for a slice of that money, and connected TV platforms like Amazon, Roku and Samsung would be able to pitch their ability to sell ads across the various streaming apps on their platforms. Not only have advertisers seen how streaming viewership has increased since March, but “roughly 50% of that is from sports viewers,” said the first agency executive, citing a mix of internal and external research, including research provided to their agency by some TV networks.

Platforms like Facebook and YouTube would also be candidates, considering the billions of people that use them each month. However, TV sports advertisers make a distinction in the level of programming they seek out and would be discerning in how their dollars would be allocated to social video platforms.

“I definitely think we would lean more toward premium content on CTV and OTT. There could be some cases where YouTube Select is in there,” said the third agency executive, referring to YouTube’s ad buying program that limits ads to a curated list of its most popular channels.

But the bottom line is that, even if some ad dollars do move around in the event of another sports hiatus, agency executives believe there wouldn’t be enough room across TV, streaming and digital video for all of that money to find a new home. 

“There’s not enough video to fulfill that kind of market demand,” said the second agency executive. “The NFL is more than half of the top 100 rated shows every year, and you’re talking between $300,000 and $600,000 a spot times 82 spots a game times however many games. The numbers get pretty staggering.”