• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 6, 2020

The pandemic is fundamentally restructuring the ad industry in ways many could not have anticipated -- economically, messaging, organizations, workflow, etc. -- and new research from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) indicates it is also changing the role of resources advertisers use to produce their ads, elevating the importance of in-house teams vs. the rest of the ad industry’s supply chain.

Asked which resources were “very important” post-COVID-19, 55% of the ANA members responding to a survey conducted March 30 & 31 cited their in-house agency, 42% cited another “internal team,” while only 26% said an “external agency.”

Twenty-two percent cited “media partners,” and 11% said production companies.

The special report, “Creative Messaging Development and Production Given COVID-19,” did not go into details about the explicit hardships advertisers’ teams and organizations were facing given social distancing and work-from-home or other rules, but it indicated that the creation of advertising was being impacted profoundly, especially the types of messages advertisers put into the marketplace to address consumer concerns.