DPAA CEO Barry Frey interviewed S4 Capital Executive Chairman Martin Sorrell this week on DPAA Short Connects.  Some of the highlights.

What brands did post-covid.

What we saw was a stasis in the last two weeks of march…we saw the tech companies cut their budgets and move money…they took that money and put them into purpose campaigns…that if you took the logos or names off you couldn’t tell the difference…it was a bit like virtue signaling…Package goods was varied…Colgate did pretty well…L’Oreal did OK, particularly online.  Nestle did OK, particularly online….Basically packaged goods was patchy…Healthcare was pretty good…Retail online, onfire.

Why traditional ad spending was cut during covid

There’s a CMO of a major global company, an ex-CMO, said to me…in situations like that the CMO loses power. The CEO listens to the CFO.  The budgets get cut.  And they move money…online.  And the reason they do is that’s it’s highly effective.  In the lockdowns the cost per thousand went through the floorboards and the performance metrics which are more easily measurable improve…That’s why digital I think this year will be flat, traditional will be down this year 10-15%, maybe more in some segments…

Will covid cause a permanent change in travel patterns?

100 CEO’s on a call.  And there’s the head of a hotel company…the head of an airline…and he head of a fast food set of chains…The guy from the hotel company says we’re going to go back to normal.  Everybody will book hotels again.  The guy running the airline says we’ll go back to normal.  Everybody will travel again.  Business and tourism.  They guy who ran the fast food company said I just cut my travel budget to zero and it’s not going to be back to more than 50% of what it was.  So standby for changes.  I’m not going to travel as much…I will travel less frequently.  I won’t do the 1-2 day trips…What covid taught me is that time is your most valuable commodity…

Insider’s take:  Disagree with Sorrell’s call on travel.  Business travel and tourism is correlated with economic activity and will rebound when the economy rebounds after we’ve got a vaccine.  Travel came back after 9/11 and swine flu and the great recession and it will come back after covid.

You can watch the whole interview below.

What do you think about Sorrell’s comment that traffic spending isn’t coming back?  Let Insider know using the form below.

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