• by Jared Rodecker , November 2, 2020

As with most other aspects of life, the pandemic has greatly affected the way agencies and brands are able to forecast marketing leads. Small potatoes compared to life-and-death situations, obviously, but marketers must still cope with this newfound reality.

Being able to forecast with a reasonable degree of accuracy the volume of marketing leads and conversions that will result from a given media budget is a core function of most marketing departments, and critical to business and financial planning.

The sudden explosion of COVID-19 onto the national consciousness and the economy in March 2020 was a textbook example of the kind of exogenous shock that can wreak havoc on existing forecasting models trained on historical data prior to the coronavirus crisis.

There’s simply no real comparable event in the past few years for most brands to use as a proxy.

On a certain level, agencies and brands had to be humble and accept that they simply didn’t know how things would play out in April and May before some training data in the coronavirus era could accumulate. Many brands recognized that the pandemic would hurt their business and gave their forecasts an aggressive haircut to brace for the worst.

Obviously, impacts vary dramatically for different brands and can be highly specific to certain sectors. Many auto insurers reaped windfalls because reduced driving during lockdown dramatically reduced claims; meanwhile, airlines and hotels were decimated. It was highly idiosyncratic, and there was no one-size-fits-all explanation.

So, yes, COVID has definitely impacted media performance — but not always in the expected ways. Many brands were excited to have captive audiences at home watching TV and consuming streaming content (via YouTube or Hulu, for example), but in many cases found that the audience, while larger, was not necessarily engaged with marketing or looking to buy.

In many cases, the larger macroeconomy — unemployment numbers, temporary governmental COVID relief, and other factors — had a bigger influence than the shift in media consumption patterns. Each brand has to collect the relevant COVID data and model against its own particular business situation to understand the particular impacts on its business.
No forecasting technique or statistical adjustment can automatically control for sudden, unexpected, unprecedented shocks to the business environment.

The most successful brands in dealing with COVID were those that quickly realized their existing models, methods, and tools needed to be set aside in the very near term. That said, they needn’t be scrapped, as they are likely to regain their value when the business environment settles into a new normal.

Really, having flexible scenario planning tools is the most important piece of the forecasting puzzle. No one knew how COVID would play out, but having tools that allow the business to simulate a large variety of scenarios at scale provided nimble marketers the chance to map out the frontier of possibilities and plan accordingly.