No such thing as ‘a typical day’
It’s important to note that not everyone was suddenly at home in 2020 with time on their hands. For frontline workers the situation has been incredibly stressful, whilst many have struggled to continue to work and juggle other responsibilities. However, with a sizable proportion of the population forced to work from home or on different forms of furlough or government salary assistance, it is clear that many people’s mobility was severely restricted. Lifestyles will remain constrained to varying degrees until the virus is defeated, constrained either by safety guidelines or people’s own caution. This means people are less likely to be traveling and commuting, out in the evenings and inevitably have more time at home to fill.
So the question is how consumer behavior will be impacted in the long term, in particular with regard to working practices. A significant and permanent increase in home working would have major implications for society and the economy. It would be beneficial in terms of the environmental impact of commuting, with the workforce balanced more between rural and urban areas and less extreme reliance on city centers. Homeworking also fosters diversity and inclusivity, opening up flexible work opportunities for the disabled, for parents, for those in rural areas.
There are nonetheless concerns about the societal and economic implications of a move to homeworking, with a structural shift in the leisure retail and entertainment and a slowdown of urban economies.
A higher proportion of homeworking does seem inevitable. This has implications for ad planning. Even before the pandemic it was already hard to talk about the typical shape of someone's day. Ironically while lockdowns enforce an unusual degree of conformity, the resulting longer-term increase in homeworking will make it even harder for researchers and advertisers in particular to generalize about the shape of someone's day: when they are available, what they see and when they see it. Will there be a ‘typical’ day anymore? Not just from person to person depending on lifestyle, but across a person’s week juggling office and home days. This complexity and diversity in behaviors could strengthen the need for precise micro-targeting, as opposed to reliance on broad demographics and dayparts.
The pandemic is likely to have a lasting impact on commuting and transport in three main ways: an increase in homeworking reducing the numbers of commuters, more variation in travel patterns across the week away from the 9-5 office job, and also a shift from public to private transport (cars, bicycles, walking).
A long-term impact of the crisis will be a reduction in what people judge to be an acceptable degree of crowding on trains and buses during rush hour, even when things eventually do get back to a new normal. All of these factors have implications for media exposure, be it to mobile media accompanying travel or to ambient advertising. The effect on outdoor media is likely to be profound and enduring.