advertising market 2022: freeze or act?

The advertising market is frozen in anticipation, just like most people in the country. Military action, mobilization. Many businesses have not only cut budgets but also left the market: some are waiting for better times, some are gone for good.

Those who remain have to reconfigure technical and marketing processes, find a replacement for what no longer works, integrate new services, and try to predict what will "fall off" in the next moment.

The crises of 2014, the pandemic in 2020, the market collapse in February 2022, recovery by September, and bam... mobilization. We want to talk about how to save businesses on the advertising market this year and share our proven ways to stay afloat because our company is one of those who survived these crises and confidently stands on its own two feet in the next difficult time.

The number of customers, as well as budgets, has sharply decreased, and communication has to be changed, resources optimized. Working as before will not work - conditions are changing. Based on our experience, corrections are now being made in technical, semantic, internal, and external directions on the marketing/advertising market.

How to improve technical work?

Among the technical adjustments, we offer the following:

1. Reducing costs. The best thing to do now in financial terms is to refuse non-essential things:

• - reduce the volume of targeted, contextual, and media advertising and focus on free promotion channels - mailings, website, social networks
• - any planned events such as conferences or master classes are moved to an online format
• - switch employees to remote work, refuse to rent an office space

2. Test all changes. We carefully monitor the consequences of all changes made. If we are spending a budget on advertising with bloggers to promote through social networks but do not see results, we abandon this tool and replace it with another. If the transition to remote work affected the quality of employee work, we agree to work in a coworking space. In other words, while losing in quantity, we carefully monitor the quality.

3. Turn our negatives into positives. If we have to sacrifice familiar resources, we compensate for this with creativity. Remember how during the sanctions, many companies replaced the bright colorful packaging of their products with white minimalist design? We have already talked about the example of global brands using creative solutions to overcome difficulties in the article «4 growth points of brand communication in the new environment».

Should Communication be Changed?

Adjustments to the meaning are also inevitable:

How to Work with Clients?

We focus the company's external actions on the following aspects:

How to Interact with the Team?

It is no less important to maintain a positive internal working atmosphere within the team and not to remain idle:

To Freeze or Act?

Now we need to look for solutions that will help our colleagues and clients deal with the situation. Whenever external economic or political crises restrict us, support is needed. We suggest moving forward, albeit at a slower pace. Meanwhile, rather than doing nothing or doing as well as possible, we choose the latter.