Things change when you have a pandemic. And sometimes that's for the best. Indeed, panelists at Wednesday's Brand Insider Summit D2C agreed as much.

A lot of people, probably most, think of Fandango as a movie ticket purveyor. That it is. But it also own Rotten Tomatoes and Vudu and provides tons of entertainment content.

The brand also partners with its identified innovators and early adopters to create food and bring it to market in eight weeks. "You get to ride this curve up, and it is a virtuous marketing cycle."

"Maintaining the efficiency and lower CPAs," said one respondent. "Trying to scale that for the rest of the year is hard with the uncertainty of COVID-19."

The role of most marketers today is around performance. Boards want to see ROI. But there are some marketers out there who are questioning some of those assumptions and Rich Lesperance, CMO at Tecovas, is one of them.

Zenni has been setting itself up for success by creating a story, a personality around its brand in the last few years.

SimpliSafe, which sells DIY home security directly to consumers, is shooting four new holiday spots as we speak with Robert Larson, an ex-burglar who is now a family man. He's not likely to be recognized on the street as he wears a mask, and not the COVID kind either.

A takeaway: Create consistency in what users hear online and offline. Have marketing meets with other departments to make sure the message matches value.

"We used email to send out all the content we were producing at a very low cost," said Jacksonville Jaguars marketing director.

Find the right message, and target consumers based on what they're looking at on your website, said company's director of email and retention.