Unlock 1.0 has brought in a slew of relaxations for brands to kickstart recovery. After two months of subdued marketing activities across industries and geographies, things have started to pick–up. Within the Merkle Sokrati ecosystem, the spends managed by us have almost doubled in the past 6 weeks (see chart 1).
As we can see, the growth has been gradual as advertisers regain confidence. With the wheels of the economy starting up again, there is a visible swoosh shaped recovery in demand generation investments across verticals with most of these being digital first. Marketers are still understandably cautious as the lockdown period has brought in substantial changes in consumer behaviour and expectations (you can find more about it here).
As we zoom in this trend little further, we notice that Branding campaigns have been running at an all-time high as businesses strive to reconnect with consumers in the post Covid-19 context (chart 2). Furthermore, as the consumers flock to eRetail platforms (Amazon, Flipkart, etc), advertisers have been leveraging this congregation with significant jump in spends on such platforms.
Ed-Tech sectors and E-commerce (chart3) see a major spike in activities with the prevalence of online brand stores being an emerging trend in the latter. BFSI is also ramping up, especially in the past couple of weeks with key offline processes moving towards becoming completely digitised. Online streaming players (or, OTT) have been the biggest beneficiary during the lockdown, and the sector has been consistently responding to the continued high consumer demand and engagement. Other key sectors, especially Grocery, Online Pharmacy and Lending, have been enjoying tailwinds with limited investments in marketing since the lockdown.
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