Creating in a Crisis: How Covid-19 is impacting influencer marketing in the UK
Lore Oxford
The world is changing in significant ways and marketers need to understand how to navigate the new landscape. As part of our In Lockdown series, our teams from around the world delve into different sectors and trends, and share their learnings. Here, Global Head of Cultural Insights Lore Oxford examines how creators across the UK are adapting during the pandemic.
Covid-19 is unlike any global crisis society has encountered to date – not least because it’s the first to occur post-internet. This has its pros and cons. It’s enabled connection, intimacy and entertainment on an unprecedented scale. But it’s also allowed for the proliferation of anxiety and misinformation at a rate more rapid than even the virus itself.
Against this backdrop, the question of how commercial entities can, and should, communicate during this time has been met with uncertainty; forecasts for global ad spend in 2020 are in decline. But while brands and marketers take a minute to recalibrate, influencers and creators are adapting in real-time, responding to a spike in user engagement. It’s a trend that’s been recorded across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, driven by the fact that (at the time of writing) more than a third of the global population are currently in lockdown. Influencers and creators are uniquely valuable during this time – not just as marketing channels, but as conduits of audience understanding. Yet many are reporting that their income is in decline.
We spoke to British creators across three key sectors to explore how the pandemic is impacting content creation, what brands can learn from these shifts, and how they should be adapting the way they work with creators both now and in the new reality.
