remains uncertain in the second half of the year, and believes total TV ad spend won't recover to pre-Covid-19 levels until "well into 2021."Much of the recovery will be contingent on a return to production, which has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
"We brought NASCAR back using only 1/3 of the people we would normally have trackside. Our director and camera operators and audio were on site, while graphics, replays, producers and talent were spread out between Charlotte and Los Angeles," CEO Lachlan Murdoch ViacomCBS said it's using a phased approach to its return to production, based on "geography, show format, in-studio versus location-based productions, along with other considerations."
"Like everyone else in the industry, we're working on ways to resume production and we hope to see that engine start to fire back up next month," CEO John Stankey said. "Having said that, it's one of our more challenging things we're doing to respond to the pandemic and it's going to take time to return to our February production levels. We view getting our production back online as critical to making our 2021 subscriber plan.
"It's clearly slower developing," he said. "And I think the agencies ... they're aware of tightening inventory concerns. They are inclined to put their money [in, but] an issue they have is, not all of their clients have revealed what their budgets will be due to the uncertainty of the times."