Digital Habits Die Hard
Consumers in the U.S. might be returning to normal this summer. Brands are never going back.
Ready or not, we’re only five weeks away the most anticipated summer since The Beatles released Sgt. Peppers.
Summer of Love, meet Summer of Pfizer.
Memorial Day weekend won’t magically mark the end of the pandemic, but it will usher in a collective euphoria and economic frenzy unseen in ages.
You want to let loose. I want to let loose. The Fed wants us to let loose. Irrepressibly, we’ll find ways to “return to normal.”
But even if we’ve escaped the grips of the pandemic and entered into a new seltzer-soaked Roaring Twenties — two big ifs we don’t take lightly — we’ve developed habits over the last year that will heavily inform our “post-pandemic” behavior and even shape the rest of our lives. Irreversibly, we’ve changed.
Old dogs learned new tricks
Consumers widely embraced new online behavior and technology in 2020. We didn’t have a choice.
By some accounts, we crammed 10 years’ of digital transformation into a three-month period starting in March 2020. The scale of human innovation and adaptation catalyzed by the pandemic can’t be overstated. Relationships. Food and health. Education and employment. Hobbies and leisure. Automation and money. Everything changed.
We’re an Ad Tech company, so we’ll leave the thinkpieces about telehealth, remote learning, and cryptocurrency disruption to the experts (though… just note that 1 Bitcoin cost $5,165 on March 13, 2020 and $61,283 a year later 🤯).
Here are some of the most staggering pandemic-driven media and content stats we’ve been mulling over:
- Screentime: Luddites look away. Americans spent an average of 10 hours and nine minutes staring into screens before Covid-19. The pandemic stacked 3+ hours atop that (13 hours 28 minutes per day) — meaning many of us spend 70% or more of our waking hours on-screen.
- Shopping: Between 80 and 90% of Americans changed the way they shop because of the pandemic.
- Streaming & TV: The major streaming services saw 50% growth in paid subscriptions YoY (see Fig. 2). Conversely, cord-cutting has only accelerated. Traditional pay-TV bundle subscribers will fall to 50 million within five years.
- Social Media: The average American adult spends 82 minutes on social media per day, a 10% YoY rise after two years of no growth. 48% of adults under 29 use TikTok.
- Live Video: Twitch saw a 69% rise in hours watched compared to 2019–7.6 billion more hours. Twitch’s entry into professional sports streaming also signals broader upheaval in broadcasting — seen most recently by the rise and fall of the European Super League.
- Subscription Economy: Beyond streaming, paid subscribers to Substack doubled pre-to-post pandemic. Similarly, in April 2019 OnlyFans received 240K visits; in April 2021, it received 22.6M (data according to SEMrush).
- NFTs: NBA Top Shot has facilitated the sale of over $500M worth of virtual trading cards. And the NFT market is just heating up.
How will this affect agencies and advertisers going forward?
McKinsey said “The Recovery will be Digital” and that just about nails it.
The “digital non-linear” customer journey is the new normal.
The share of consumer-brand interactions that are digital vs. in-person rose from 41% in December 2019 to 65% in July 2020 (we’re betting the farm it’s never again dipping below 60% as retailers continue downsizing their brick-and-mortar presence and Gen Z commands greater purchasing power).
Millennial and Gen Z consumers discover and research far more brands from Instagram stories, YouTube reviews and TikToks than they do from all traditional marketing channels combined.
This shift triggered a mad dash toward omni-channel investment (eCommerce, personalization, automation, social media strategy, digital advertising, etc.). DTC companies — already equipped with much of the necessary tech, partnerships, and influencers (lest we forget…) to succeed despite stay-at-home orders — sat back and smirked at their rivals in traditional retail.
Some brands rose to the occasion, investing in rich, frictionless, customer-centric, and community-based digital journeys. Others didn’t — and they were punished by disloyal and unforgiving consumers with high expectations for brand products, experiences, and values.
Of the Americans who changed their shopping behavior since COVID-19 began, around 40 percent say they have changed brands, with the level of brand switching doubling in 2020 compared to 2019. McKinsey.
More importantly, 75 to 83% of consumers whose shopping behavior changed during the pandemic said their new purchasing habits would continue after the pandemic (Fig. 3).
It’s a turbulent time for the industry, and the only constant is data.
Advertising mediums and styles come and go, but the need to understand your customers, your competitors, and your market never changes.
Above: coveted brand placements in 1959 (famous newspaper ad), 2012 (acclaimed TV commercial), and 2021 (glowing review from a social media influencer).
The disruption unleashed on the Ad Tech industry by Covid — increased social media use, declining cable subscriptions, etc. — presents clear opportunities for creative marketers armed with good consumer data and insight.
Some of this is already coming to fruition with the current “boom” in digital advertising spending.
But as companies pour more and more of their marketing dollars into creating and promoting digital content, technology is sorely needed to help monitor and measure non-linear customer journeys.
Brand and market intelligence should be as easily collected and analyzed from Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Netflix, as it is from traditional commercials, direct mail, and circulars.
In order for this to happen, digital content needs to be better gathered, scanned, and indexed. Considering how much data we produce and how many videos we view per day (20 billion), this is no small task — and it’s definitely not something that can be done by hand.
We use Machine Learning to automate brand recognition and data labeling, extracting detailed market intelligence from visual media. Name the source and we’ll scan it for logos and other brandprints, products, and pricing, and more.
So whether you need help proactively analyzing weekly Facebook advertising or the Netflix Top 100, we can help you widen your media monitoring lens. Deep.ad data outputs align directly with typical Marketing, Sales, and Business Intelligence reporting so you can connect the dots between things like your Social Video Share of Voice and eCommerce data to analyze lift and dip.
Want to see how we can help you adapt to the post-pandemic digital media landscape? Contact us and let us show you!
Final Note:
Covid-19 is still causing untold suffering in many parts of the world. We are extremely fortunate to have early access to safe and effective vaccines as Americans, and we acknowledge the unique privilege and inequity of this access globally. We encourage everyone to observe CDC/WHO and local protocols and make smart, selfless decisions to help curb the spread of the pandemic. Our hearts go out to everyone directly or indirectly affected by the disease.
