Keep Calm and Advertise On
Insights: Marketer's Guide

Keep Calm and Advertise On

How to Successfully Navigate Your Brand Through an Economic Downturn

The question we hear from brand marketers over and over is “Should I continue to spend during this economic crisis?”

Brand marketing teams and agencies play a crucial role in advocating for campaigns and budgets to their finance and company leadership.

But how can you advocate for your campaigns and defend your budgets in the face of economic turmoil?

This definitive guide arms you with 100 years of irrefutable data, marketing principles and real-world case studies that clearly demonstrate how maintaining or increasing ad spend will grow brand share of market, both in near- and long-term.  


What this guide will prepare you with:

  • Why pulling back spend is so detrimental to a brand’s short- and long-term financial success
    • An analysis across 400 brands showed that those who increased spend saw a nearly 70% increase in ROI vs. brands that decreased their spend.
  • The inextricable connection between share of voice and share of market, especially in a recessionary period.
    • In a study during the ’08 recession, brands that kept their SOV flat relative to their competitors did not experience any profit growth, whereas 38% of brands who planned increases to their SOV experienced very large profit growth.
  • How brands like Amazon, Walmart, T-Mobile, General Mills and Hershey used the ’08 recession to catapult their growth– and the lessons for other advertisers.
    • Amazon launched its first TV campaign in the middle of the recession in 2008 and saw a compound annual growth rate of 34% between 2008-2012.


While we’ve seen nothing like our current pandemic, the marketing principles and historical examples of how brands thrive – and fail - in times of crisis surely apply.

To defend your budget and turn a recessionary period into a catalyst for growth, download the guide or view the webinar.

To hear more about this topic and other trends impacting the industry, check out our VAB INSPIRE: Virtual Learning Series here.

1990-1991 Recession: the negative effect of cutting ad spend resulted in significant share loss to competitors
2008 - 2009 Recession: brands who increased their TV spend experienced positive business outcomes

Keep Calm and Advertise On

Keep Calm and Advertise On

How to Successfully Navigate Your Brand Through an Economic Downturn

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