It has been a little over a year since COVID-19 lockdowns changed consumer habits – in more ways than one. Live sports came to a screeching halt, not to return for months, and productions were no longer taking place due to stay at home orders for all non-essential workers. Every industry was disrupted – including TV advertising. Networks were flexible with advertisers who needed to pull all advertising, while some advertisers worked frantically to change messaging to offer support.

iSpot.tv recently conducted a study looking at Year over Year (YoY) changes in the TV landscape. When comparing March 2020 through February 2021 to the previous year (March 2019 through February 2020), there was an overall decline in estimated television ad spending of around 3.9%, or roughly $67.3 billion; however, we did see the door open to new brands entering the space, and they benefited greatly. Some of those newcomer brands were products geared around things you could enjoy while “stuck at home.” AHA sparkling water, Stressballs and streaming networks such as discovery + and AMC+ all took advantage of the increased ad space availability, as well as the increase in overall impressions by 6x or roughly 3%. Streaming services saw one of the largest increases in ad impressions YoY (125%). This was followed by laundry at almost 61%, and vitamins and supplements with an increase of 50% in ad impressions YoY.

With stay-at-home orders slowly lifting and vaccines rolling out, it will be interesting to see YoY comparisons from Q3 2020 to Q3 2021.