Mumbai: The Media & Entertainment sector is facing unprecedented challenges from the spread of COVID-19. Rapid changes in consumer behavior and consumption, stoppages in content production, cancellation of live events and sports, and cuts in advertising spend, are impacting companies across the ecosystem. Media agencies, many of which were grappling with operational volatility, are struggling to maintain media spend as marketers manage risks and reduce spend rapidly.
Publishers and media companies are benefitting from some marketers seeing the opportunity but face advertising revenue losses. Film and TV producers are under pressure to mitigate the impact of delayed-release schedules, theatre closures, and production stoppages.
EY released a report called ‘Building a resilient enterprise- Now, Next and Beyond’ sector response to covid-19 talks about the various growth and downfalls.
According to the report by EY, demand for knowledge and entertainment has increased, but ad revenues and content production are impacted and also the impact of the accelerated consumer shift to digital journeys has led to the action of ensuring digital sales and service models are effective as a traditional journey and also considering movie content distribution intended to physical venues to digital channels.
With the impact on marketers cut ad spend and demand agile response times has led to the action of acceleration of efforts around ad ops and creative production support to enhance responsiveness to marketer needs, with proactively conducting brand sentiment analysis and consumer research to offer stronger insights and consider incentives or package bundles to maintain or motivate ad spend, including entertainment or escapism content.
With the rapid transition to virtualized working environments, the impact has effected into leveraging collaborative software to maintain productivity and connection with vendors and clients (e.g. Microsoft Teams), acceleration of efforts around self-service and inside/ virtualized sales and develop models for virtualized customer service rapidly, including potential for augmented reality. Also lastly the impact of the cancellation of content production and launch has led to the action in revisiting programming schedules to extract value out of a back catalog, accelerating releases to enhance consumer engagement, and identifying partners with virtualized content production capabilities.
The report also highlighted the positive impact that is witnessed by India in sectors like OTT, Gaming, E-sports, Digital Subscriptions, and VFX, while Traditional TV, radio, and content production are temporarily impacted. Films, Live events, Sports, OOH, MICE, and print are negatively impacted.
While on the global level, the impact has lowered outlook for 2020, continuing core operations, reviewing investments and divestitures, and ramping up capacity to address the challenge.
