Consumers Vs. The Ad Trade: How COVID-19 Impacts Their Media Consumption

To understand how the pandemic crisis is impacting the media consumption patterns of American consumer, as well as the advertising industry, MediaPost collaborated with two leading research organizations -- ad trade B2B researcher Advertiser Perceptions and consumer polling platform Pollfish -- to find out how much each constituency is relying on various sources of media for information about the COVID-19 national health emergency.

The patterns are interesting among those individual stakeholders, but they are fascinating when contrasting the two.

Generally speaking, the findings show that both consumers and ad industry executives rely much more on their major national and local news outlets than on social media, health-related content sites (such as WebMD, etc.), podcasts, non-health content related sites, etc., but both advertisers and agency executives signal they are much more reliant on media overall than consumers are for that information.

The ad industry also has much higher regard for official government and health organization websites for information about the outbreak than consumers do.

In terms of reported time spent with these media sources, ad industry executives also indicate they are much more voracious users of most forms of media for accessing information about COVID-19 than consumers are (see consumer time-spent below, and ad executive time-spent below that).

We will be reporting on more of the findings contrasting consumer and ad-trade sentiment and self-reported behaviors from both studies over the next several days, and both Advertiser Perceptions and MediaPost plan to continue tracking both over the coming weeks and months, as needed.

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