Point of View – Romania after lockdown

After the lockdown’s end date on the 15th of May, things changed but did not get back to normal. The pandemic and the lockdown changed the whole perspective when it came to advertising, selling & customer behavior. Everyone, brands, and customers became nervous and had to change the way they lived and communicated, a thing that installed a generic state of anxiety. Because of that, three big challenges were coming our way:

First, our clients wanted to freeze or cancel their campaigns. Then, they did not know what to communicate and what to do on the long run. Moreover, it was a crisis but also, an opportunity to create growth for our clients by helping them overcome it.

It was an opportunity to position ourselves as a consultant, to get out of the role of executors and to create priming experience bias for Wavemaker and GroupM and therefore to create new business in the future.

The problem for our clients was that they were receiving a lot of information about COVID-19, but it was fragmented, contradictory and they did not know what to do with it. Our added value was to come with a unitary, constructive and clear guidance perspective on COVID-19’s impact and a solution on what should our clients do in those times.

Brands needed a guide on how to communicate in pandemic times and the POV had that exact purpose. Given the fact that our Head of Strategy, Insights & Content had access and expertise in this domain, the POV document was the normal thing to do.

The guide analyzes data from various sources showed that the lockdown and the time after it brought major changes for most brands and that from now on, the impact of actions would be disproportional. How the situation will evolve may not be predictable, but the guide analyzes the types of changes and the effects on behavior and purchasing decisions.

The POV was shared with all the agencies within GroupM and their clients. It was discussed one-on-one with the clients that needed guidance. With every change in the statistics or every new information regarding the post-lockdown period, there was an updated version of the document and it continues to be updated frequently. There are over 20 updated versions of the POV with over 400 pages; an Update History can be found in the last pages of the guide.