For marketers, there is no respite in sight as much of 2021 will be about coming to terms with challenges posed by the pandemic Year 2020 is history, but it has left a host of challenges behind for marketers to tackle. If we look back, the last 10 months have altered marketing strategy drastically across categories. While the positive buzz around Covid 19 vaccine is being welcomed, for marketers, there is no respite in sight as much of 2021 will be about coming to terms with challenges posed by the pandemic. With CMOs resetting their marketing strategy to suit the changed business environment, here are some big challenges that will continue to worry them in 2021:

This pandemic has made marketers frugal than ever, and rightly so. In most cases, Covid 19 has forced marketers to re-negotiate price points. Now agencies and vendors are doing the same work at a lesser cost. This arrangement is likely to stay here; the big challenge for the CMOs will be convincing the board members about increasing marketing spends to pre-covid times. Will it happen? And how soon? Finding Offline Opportunities To Target Customers Though malls have opened with strict protocols and are witnessing steady rise in footfalls, the numbers are still not encouraging enough for marketers to justify offline ad spends. For now, the experiential spends will continue to find relevance in gamification and fantasy leagues and not purely offline. There is also buzz that big sporting events may continue to be on hold in 2021 and the popular ones like IPL may be held virtually once gain. Dealing with Digital Fraud While Covid 19 has shifted ad spends to digital like never before, however, this large-scale adoption of digital has given rise to concerns like ad-fraud in a big way. In the last 10 months, there has been a rapid rise in cybercrimes such as web-skimming, malware campaigns and phishing scams, as per a report on Fraud & Risk Management in Digital Payments by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and Paypal. For CMOs, while digital will continue to be a bigger pie for marketing spends, ensuring brand safety and avoiding ad-fraud will continue to remain challenges to tackle. Finding balance between TV and OTT While TV enjoys the privilege of being the most impactful medium for brand building, the steep rise in demand for OTT content has forced marketers to rethink their strategy. With ongoing market uncertainty, CMOs are under pressure to focus on those media channels which are efficient and effective in reaching audiences, especially in premium environments. If we look at the recent content consumption trends, while subscription video on-demand (SVOD) is popular, the trend for advertising video on-demand (AVOD) is also growing rapidly, giving marketers hope to tap consumers hooked on to their favourite streaming content. According to some experts, in 2021, video streaming will become a mass consumer behaviour and of strategic importance to the advertising and marketing industry. For CMOs the bet between TV and OTT will be a tough one to make in 2021.