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Stay calm and download app

“Well, America might not know who its next president is yet,” Ad Age’s Ilyse Liffreing writes, “but there was at least one winner of Election Night—the Calm app. ... Calm sponsored CNN’s ‘Key Race Alerts’ throughout the night and ran a 30-second spot during CNN coverage, featuring nothing but rain falling on leaves.” Watch the spot here.

Liffreing serves up stats on Calm’s Election Day social media chatter courtesy of analytics company Talkwalker, and now we’ve also got fresh data on the driver of that buzz—the Calm TV ad blitz itself. Ad-tracking platform iSpot.tv has shared the following data exclusively with Datacenter Weekly:

• Calm’s actually been building up to Election Day with a sustained campaign. It racked up 66 million TV ad impressions from Oct. 31 through Nov. 3—with just 11 million of the 66 million coming on Election Day.
• Over the last 30 days, Calm has run up 241.7 million TV ad impressions with an estimated media value of $1.4 million, per iSpot.
• Networks including HGTV, Hallmark and Freeform have been delivering the bulk of those impressions, but it took Calm’s high-profile, high-cost placements during election coverage Tuesday evening to give the app its social-buzz boost.
• In addition to advertising on CNN, Calm also served ads to Election Day viewers of MSNBC, E!, HGTV, IFC, Freeform, the Discovery Family Channel and the Discovery Life Channel.
• The “Do nothing for 15 seconds” ad linked above aired 80 times yesterday across networks.
• It’s worth noting that Calm advertised during Freeform’s Election Day airing of—wait for it—“The Hunger Games, Mockingjay: Part 2.”

Flashback

We won’t dwell any further on the election right now, but just a quick note that in the last edition of Datacenter Weekly, we made a point of sharing the following links:

“Fox News Poll: Trump gains in Ohio, Biden ahead in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,” per Fox News (Oct. 21).

“Poll that predicted Trump win in 2016 finds him closing gap with Biden,” per the New York Post, a Fox News corporate cousin (Oct. 20).

Disaster recovery

You can now get your hands on “Marketing in the time of COVID-19,” Ad Age’s new (free) white paper offering a deep data dive into what’s happened to marketers, media and brands during the coronavirus pandemic. Ad Age Datacenter produced the report based on data and analysis from Kantar. Get facts and stats on how the pandemic has affected ad spending, social media, consumer behavior, sports marketing, retailing and advertising creative. Download it here. 

TV $et

ICYMI: “After several years of price declines for broadcast TV’s biggest shows,” Ad Age’s Jeanine Poggi writes, “advertisers paid substantial increases for 30 seconds of airtime in many returning series in the 2020-2021 season, according to Ad Age’s annual survey of media agencies. Of 80 returning series on the big four broadcast networks and The CW tracked by Ad Age, 38 saw the cost for a 30-second commercial increase and another 22 were flat compared with last year. Only 21 saw their price decrease on a year-over-year basis.”

The gist:  See Ad Age’s top 10 list of the priciest shows on broadcast here.

Hear this

In a just-released “Exponential View with Azeem Azhar” podcast episode titled “Should We End the Data Economy?,” presented by the Harvard Business Review, Azhar speaks with Dr. Carissa Véliz from the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford about “what’s wrong with the data economy.” HBR sums up their talking points thusly:

Why Google’s founders were initially opposed to selling ads.
Why privacy legislation stalled after 9/11.
How personalized content fractures the public sphere.
How the Nazis used population data to identify victims.
Why we should ban trading in personal data.

Listen here.

The upside of tough times

Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson has authored “Downtime Opportunity,” a 56-page white paper that examines marketing, product and media innovation in the worst of times from the Great Depression to the great coronavirus pandemic. Conclusion: Economic downturns reset the table for marketers and media, creating new rules, opportunities and brands. The report is available as a free download for Ad Age Insider and Ad Age Datacenter subscribers (or for purchase by everyone else) at AdAge.com/downtime2020.

Click for the quick take:  “How marketing can thrive in the worst of times.”

Further reading:  An election-themed take on that white paper by John Dioso, editor of Ad Age Studio 30: “Election 2020: It’s the end of the world as we know it (and we’ll be fine).”

Just briefly

• “Massachusetts voters pass right-to-repair expansion opening up car data,” per Engadget.

• “Wisconsin National Guard helping transfer data from misprinted ballots,” The Hill reports. 

• “A Vaccine Data Guide for the Perplexed,” from Bloomberg News.

• “Why Isn’t Your Brand Bigger? The Data Point to One Answer,” per Gallup.

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Catherine Wolf.

This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.