• by Wayne Friedman , April 6, 2020

Advertising spending for the marketing of virtual video meeting platforms has been sharply higher due to the COVID-19 virus keeping millions of workers at home.

Last month, March spending -- when many stay-at-home orders were instituted by states -- witnessed a doubling of ad spending over February and January periods to $24 million, according to MediaRadar, a media research company. In February, spending came in at $11 million, while in January it was at $10 million.

This activity is also much higher versus the long-term quarterly period: From January through March 22 of this year, $32 million was spent in total by virtual meeting marketers including Microsoft Teams, Fuze, GoTo Meeting, Grammarly, Slack Technologies, and Zoom Video Communications.

By way of comparison, $15 million was spent in each of the first, third and fourth quarters of 2019. In second-quarter 2019, spending totaled $10 million.

Microsoft Teams, the largest advertiser year-to-date, has seen an increase of 12 million daily active users on that platform in the most recent two weeks of reporting. Slack reportedly has seen similar gains.

MediaRadar says that currently, 93 of the Fortune 100 companies have reported using virtual video meeting platforms.

MediaRadar’s data comes from artificial intelligence and machine learning of advertising-spend estimates across a wide range of digital media -- including YouTube, Snapchat and podcasts --  as well as national TV and print media.