The spread of coronavirus has adversely affected the daily lives of millions globally, and online news and content related to the evolving situation grow rapidly. While the world faces larger and more pressing issues than advertising contexts and brand suitability, many marketing and publishing professionals are seeking guidance on how to appropriately navigate this unprecedented situation.
In an effort to be better informed and focus on the facts, Integral Ad Science (IAS), the global leader in digital ad verification undertook a consumer survey amongst people in Singapore to determine the type of content consumers are engaging with, how do they perceive content adjacencies—and whether they’re changing their digital behaviours related to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the survey results, a whopping 91% of Singaporean consumers are actively seeking out coronavirus news and content online while 87% of consumers are consuming more news generally because of the evolving coronavirus situation. Coronavirus has led to a shift in content consumption patterns in 75% of the Singaporeans and this is consistent with an uptick in ad impression volumes observed in this region.
When it comes to favourability, just over-one third of Singaporean consumers believe that the appropriateness of coronavirus ad adjacency “depends on the brand”, and this makes sense. Specifically, Singaporean consumers most want to see Health/Pharma, Government, and Educational ads in coronavirus adjacencies while they least want to see Travel, Food/Beverage, and Finance brands alongside this same type of content.
“Singaporeans are actively seeking more news and content related to the unfolding Coronavirus situation and at the same time we are seeing marketers increasingly block against coronavirus content adjacencies as they pause to evaluate their comfort with this type of content,” says Tony Marlow, CMO IAS. “However, there doesn’t need to be this type of trade-off regarding scale. IAS already empowers many cutting-edge marketers to control where their brands appear online at a level of precision much finer than a keyword alone. We do this through cognitive semantic technologies that consider not just keywords but also the sentiment and contextual intent of given content. This means that for brands that don’t want to block their ads from being served near positive community stories related to coronavirus, for example, we can make it happen where some of our competitors’ keyword solutions may not be able to help”.
Marlow continued: “Most importantly of all right now, the IAS family would like to give special thanks to all of the Singaporean healthcare providers, SCDF, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Manpower and everyday community heroes working to keep our communities safe, healthy and informed in the midst of the current situation. We are in this together and together we will prevail”.
Read the report here.
