How a stay-at-home year accelerated three trends in the advertising industry

This time last year, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green watched as advertisers started to pause every campaign they could. 

The ad tech executive said in the early days of the pandemic, digital advertising was at a disadvantage. It was easier for advertisers to flip the switch and pause spending as they tried to figure out what to do. But in the following months as marketing dollars started to turn back on, it became clear they were flowing online.

“Everybody becomes more data-driven and more agile during a recovery, because every dollar has to count,” Green said. “So that’s when that’s when it really accelerated for us. So we were disproportionately hurt in the first month. And we’ve been disproportionately benefiting ever since.”

The Trade Desk saw firsthand how certain pieces of the ad industry were catapulted years forward as consumers stayed at home during the pandemic. Digital reigned supreme: Flexible buys, an ability to switch out messaging and direct-response buys that clearly showed return-on-investment were in high-demand by many advertisers who often had no idea what the next month, or even the next week, would look like. 

Those themes lent themselves to major progress in areas like connected TV and e-commerce marketing, where the pieces were already in place for growth, but which the pandemic thrust forward. And the way the ad industry may have also changed the way it works in the process.

“These things were already happening,” said Barak Kassar, co-founder at independent creative agency BKW Partners. “And it just, whoosh, just made it happen faster.”

Experts and executives in the space spoke to CNBC about three areas where the ad industry saw leaps ahead during the pandemic.