Alice said “There’s a bit of differentiation between the large players and effectively the long tail of smaller groups or independents who have felt the effects of the pandemic differently. All players, but pretty much every local site bar a small number of exceptions, run digital advertising and so even though traffic went up – and in some cases went up kind of substantially – the flow-through of digital ad revenue was was not as strong as it would have been in pre-pandemic times.”
She added “In the tail it’s likely that there would be a greater reliance on SME advertising and that means that when those businesses were forced to close and when that marketing spend was poor they will have been more affected and less able to restructure costs, which is what the large groups have been able to do."
There were, however “no real winners last year. Every regional house had staff losses and huge costs… It was a pretty bad year for the industry as a whole.”