Advertising in Pandemic Times

Abstract

Advertising is one key element for companies to transmit information to their stakeholders. Although the times and the uncertainty of the future are nowadays something very common, and what is much worse is that, the global economy must recover after the Pandemic. Entire economic sectors, like tourism, events, hotels, restaurants, cafes, transportation, spas, more precisely tourism sectors were affected and had not only to diminish their activities, but even to close down their businesses. Organizations still had to communicate with their audience. In this article, we propose a model of communication and the strategies that must be taken by companies in different fields, in order to transmit the message to their stakeholders. We also conducted a research to discover if the advertising in pandemic times has changed and in what manner and intensity. It is widely known that during economic crisis, the first department where the budget is diminished is the marketing budget. After conducting the research, we have discovered that organizations laid more emphasis on security, safety and protection as main communicational axe, although other companies transmitted the opposite, even showing that we can have the same "normal life" as before the pandemic. The majority of the respondents admire ads that present the normal life and ways of returning to the life before the pandemic, being more appreciated and watched. Ads can be very powerful, but at the same time, organizations must pay attention to the way the message is interpreted and decoded.