In an instant, the ad industry moved from Madison Avenue to County Line Road, from a landscape of skyscrapers to single family homes and with it an accelerated but inevitable move from traditional advertising channels to digital media.
Traditional media
COVID-19, its associated lockdowns and fear of contagion sent consumers home and kept them out of stores. Automotive advertising in traditional media (down more than 25% for the year), travel (down more than 50%) and non-digital retail advertising (down more than 20%) were key categories in 2020's advertising spending decline.
But there’s hope.
"Traditional media made a gradual rebound through 2020, recovering from lows last seen in April as the pandemic emerged. While month-over-month spending consistently returned, the gap to year-ago levels was not fully closed by 4Q, signaling there is still ground to make up," said Gregory Aston, global chief research officer, Kantar Media Division.
"A key factor to a full recovery will be the return of key industries, namely travel, auto and retail, which are still at partial capacity."
In the second quarter of 2020 alone, media advertising dropped by a third, according to Ad Age Datacenter’s analysis of data from Kantar.
Flashback to a comment made in March 2020 by Gonzalo Del Fa, president of WPP’s GroupM Multicultural. "We had a great first quarter," Del Fa said back then. "Now everyone is trying to figure out what to do next." This was not an unfamiliar refrain as agencies and marketers grappled with plans for the rest of the year.
(Download the free white paper "Marketing in the Time of COVID-19" here, published in October 2020.)
By the end of 2020, traditional media in the U.S.—TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, outdoor and cinema—had collectively dropped 15% to $91 billion, from $107 billion in 2019. (See table below.)