The advertising industry was amongst the firsts that felt the relapse after the coronavirus lockdown, and it might be one of the lasts to recover from its negative impacts. While CEE experts have different views on how this pandemic will affect budgets and advertising foci, online can undoubtedly be declared the winner of one of the biggest crisis of all time, WeCAN reports.

“Marketing budgets are the first to be cut during a crisis” – goes the saying, which has been quite often heard since the COVID-19 lockdown in March. With still vivid memories from the financial crisis in 2008, advertisers sounded the alarm bell, when it became evident that living with social distancing and other preventive measures will stick with us for months.

Industries most heavily hit are tourism, catering, events, transportation, automotive while pharma and retail sectors were not that much affected by the crisis, according to Sonja Litaj, Client Service Director at Slovenian PAN Communication Agency. It is evident that those sectors that were hit the hardest by the coronavirus reduced their budget significantly or to zero as they had to lock up or limit their services for months.

With concerts, restaurants, cinemas shutting down, the first wave of cancelled campaigns hit BTL and event divisions early, and since then print, OOH and cinema are in a downfall as well. A lot of those clients, who didn’t necessarily have to stop, paused their campaigns out of fear or due to the suspension of production induced by the lockdown. Most of the planned campaigns were cancelled or postponed, and many times the budgets of ongoing campaigns were severely chopped.

Anita Király, COO of Media Services at Café Communications says media agencies expect a 10-15% drop in Hungary, and the recent survey of HURA, Croatian Association of Communications Agencies shows, that only 7,7% of agencies are not affected, while over 65% of them expect revenue drop up to 40%.

The experienced fall is also strongly client- and industry-related: Maja Paić, Account Director at Croatian Ascanius Media said, that the crisis decreased their revenue until May by 35% compared to last year, with the largest decrease in OOH.

Fortunately, there are always hopeful exceptions. Péter Zsembery, Associate Creative Director at Hungarian Café Communications doesn’t see significant relapse, with one of their clients, a shopping mall being “in the direct line of fire” but still communicating, they see a 10% drop compared to plans.

The absolute winner of this havoc is online: besides TV securing a small increase, anything that we can do online, skyrocketed in numbers: advertising, shopping, media consumption. This also created a make-or-break situation in many countries, as weCAN experts see, those companies, who can ride this wave, and those who can make up the missed shift to digital, they can be the real winners after the crisis.

Maja Paić says that at Croatian Ascanius Media they expect advertising to increase in Q4 – in case there is no second wave of the virus. If there is a second wave, the advertising industry will encounter historically the highest drop of investments, which can even reach 50%. In 2020 they estimate a 30% drop of investments compared to 2019 and that the industry will have to endure an additional 15% cut in 2021.