When I last wrote about the impact that of the Coronavirus on adops and digital media, I had just returned from Europe and moved in with my in-laws. Restaurants were still open and there was uncertainty as to what might happen next. My wife and I had been wearing a mask for several months, having been in Thailand when the virus hit, but was not accustomed to wearing it to the grocery store in suburban New Jersey. The publishers we work with on ad operations and monetization had yet to see drops in CPMs or budgets but the expectation of spending cuts was looming. Four months later and much has happened. The biggest media companies are laying off staff, there has been a reckoning in terms of how people of color are treated in the workforce and major advertisers have paused spending on Facebook in response to their inability to address hate speech on their platform.
I’ve written before about the importance of staying lean in business as well as establishing a strategy and sticking with it. Certainly an unforeseen crisis like the one currently in front of us requires adaptations and flexibility, but the companies that succeed in the long run are able to keep their eye on their long term objective while adjusting to current realities. This might mean making deeper cuts to operating cuts earlier than is required, or taking on clients that would not normally be considered a fit. It might mean testing ad formats that would be rejected in a normal environment in an effort to create incremental revenue. It might mean more regular calls with partners or a deeper focus on optimizations than ever before. As your team wades into this new territory, it is important that they maintain perspective. For leadership, it is critical to not panic and shift priorities toward the shiny object of the day.
For us, we will continue to focus on servicing our clients with a similar lens. We deal with the immediate actions that are in front of us while keeping the major projects that were on the roadmap pre-COVID top of mind and moving forward. The best organizations have a strategy in place and resulting projects and tasks with clear deadlines and assignees. It is easy for external pressures, especially revenue risks, to completely de-prioritize that roadmap and create short term distractions. Getting the balance of effort and focus right between immediate challenges and long term projects is incredibly difficult. Our goal is to help our clients find that balance, or at the very least handle the small tasks to allow them to focus on the things that matter most.
Ultimately, business will continue to be conducted and things will slowly return to what will be a new version of normal. SSPs are updating their technology and implementation requirements. Google continues its dominance across the advertising industry. Publishers struggle to balance monetization (more challenging than ever) and user experience (often with more traffic than ever). Creativity and execution are critical in this environment. The ability to filter out distractions is critical for leadership teams. Ironically, empathy and collaboration seem to be as high as ever, at least within the companies that we are privileged to work for. Everyone is dealing with a new set of challenges that are not always directly related to their daily responsibilities and this has brought us together. It is a moment to reflect on what we are doing right and what we could be doing better as organizations. Those that will have successfully navigated the pandemic environment when all is said and done will have leveraged their strengths and attacked their vulnerabilities to come out a better organization.