Month: June 2020

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, global advertising investment was estimated to grow at a 7.1% clip in 2020.

Now, as Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones notes, global ad spend is estimated to see a brutal contraction of 8.1% – equating to almost $50 billion – as a result of changing consumer behavior. The total loss becomes a bleak $96.4 billion when taking pre-pandemic growth forecasts into account.

Today’s graphic uses data from the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) to visualize the estimated decline in advertising spend by media format and industry.

As advertisers adapt to rising in-home media consumption, the tug-of-war for ad dollars between online and traditional media seems to have a decisive winner.

The Death of Traditional Media

After decades of experts predicting the death of traditional media formats, the COVID-19 pandemic could be the last nail in the coffin.

In fact, spend across every type of traditional media format will see a decline in 2020, while most online media formats are expected to see an increase in spending.

Mid-term, this era will be associated with an accelerant of latent and incremental trends towards more digital consumption, commerce, and thus advertising”

– Dr. Daniel Knapp, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe

With consumers spending significantly more time at home, brands are allocating more dollars to certain media formats to reflect that. However, when it comes to traditional in-home formats such as TV, consumers are opting for streaming services instead. In fact, they are streaming twice as much online video on services such as Netflix compared to last year.

Spending Estimates, by Category

Almost every industry will see reduced spending. The one category that will buck the trend is “Telecoms & Utilities”, which will experience a 4.3% increase in ad spend throughout the year.

Interestingly, stay-at-home restrictions have increased consumers’ reliance on these services for staying connected with loved ones and working from home.

Moreover, the pandemic has proved to be a turning point for the telecommunications industry, as the importance of faster internet speeds are emphasized and the potential of 5G is realized.

The Road to Recovery?

When inflation and exchange rates are taken into account, the decline in advertising spend is expected to be worse than that experienced during the global financial crisis.

Although 2021 shows signs of recovery, WARC suggests this is reflective of how steep the decline in 2020 will be.

Data shows that global advertising spending growth did not fully recover for eight years following the previous recession, so a swift recovery may be highly unlikely, and returning to pre-pandemic growth rates may not be possible for a number of years.

The Changing Advertising Landscape

As advertisers come to terms with their new reality, they are faced with the uncertainty of changing consumer behavior and the potential for a second wave to tighten quarantine restrictions once more.

Could the pandemic be accelerating the inevitable shift to digital, or is the pain for traditional media only temporary?

Authored by Edward Peter Stringham via The American Institute for Economic Research,

The school closures, stay home orders, shuttering of businesses, banning of elective surgeries, closure of physical entertainment events, blocked flights, and sudden imposition of a central plan – it all happened suddenly from mid-March in the course of only a few days, and to enormous shock on the part of people who had previously taken their freedom and rights for granted. 

Despite enormous pressure from Washington, eight states did not lock down or used a very light touch: South Dakota, North Dakota, South Carolina, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. 

After 100 days, we are in a position for some preliminary analysis of the performance of locked down states versus those that did not lock down. AIER has already published the evidence that lockdown states had higher rates of unemployment. 

The Sentinel, a nonprofit news source of the Kansas Policy Institute, confirms our research by reporting the following data: locked down states have overall a 13.2% unemployment rate, while open states have a 7.8% unemployment rate. 

But perhaps this better economic performance came at the expense of health? 

In terms of health, locked down states have nearly four times the death rate from COVID-19.

The results do not prove that staying open necessarily caused the good outcomes, but should certainly lead us to question the notion that “lockdowns are necessary or else we all are going to die.” 

To be sure, many mitigating factors may exist. Open states may have had fewer long-term health facilities housing people with low life expectacies; in every state, these account for roughly half of all deaths from COVID-19. In fact, “deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%.” 

Population density between the states also varies and that could have been an explanatory variable. The open states also lacked governors who mandated that nursing homes accept active COVID-patients. Earlier this month, we published some more detailed research “Unemployment Far Worse in Lockdown States, Data Show” by economist Abigail Devereux who found similar results.

A routine trope in the media is that people who oppose lockdowns are pushing freedom and wealth over safety and health. But as we can see from this clean examination of the results, the open states experienced less economic pain and less pain from the disease itself. 

We are seeing desperate attempts by politicians, public health officials, and media commentators somehow to make sense of why the United States pursued the course it did with the closures, stay-home orders, travel bans, and near-universal quarantine, in violation of every principle that America has celebrated in its civic culture. 

With the evidence coming in that the lockdowns were neither economically nor medically effective, it is going to be increasingly difficult for lockdown partisans to marshal the evidence to convince the public that isolating people, destroying businesses, and destroying social institutions was worth it.

Senior editor Ash Bennington hosts managing editor Ed Harrison to discuss a day of pain on Wall Street as the coronavirus shows no signs of relenting and the normally cautious Federal Reserve issued an alarming mandate to large-cap banks. Ed and Ash also flesh out their thinking on a potential “double-dip recession” and a second wave of coronavirus. In the intro, Jack Farley looks at COVID-19 data and analyzes the dire results from the Fed’s “stress test” of the banking sector.

The virus behind COVID-19 causes infected cells to sprout ‘tentacles’ which allow the virus to attack several nearby cells at once – poking holes which allow the disease to easily transfer inside.

This nightmare fuel was discovered by researchers led by the University of California, San Francisco.

“There are long strings that poke holes in other cells and the virus passes through the tube from cell to cell,” said UCSF’s Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, Professor Nevan Krogan. “Our hypothesis is that these speed up infection.“

The images taken by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory in the US and University of Freiburg in Germany will be published in the medical journal Cell on Saturday.

Most viruses do not cause infected cells to grow these tentacles. Even those that do, such as smallpox, do not have as many or the same type of branching as Sars-Cov-2, the virus behind Covid-19. –FT

According to the report, the silver lining is that the tentacle discovery may pave the way for a number of drugs to work against the disease – most of which were previously being used to treat cancer.

“It totally makes sense there’s an overlap in anticancer drugs and an antiviral effect,” said Prof. Krogan, who added that cancers, HIV and SARS-CoV-2 are all searching for the “Achilles heel of the cell.”

Potential drugs include silmitasertib, made by Taiwan-based Senhwa Biosciences – which is working with the NIH on trials in the US. The drug works by inhibiting the CK2 enzyme which is used to build the tubes.

The drug is one of five which were found to be more effective against the virus than Gilead’s remdesivir, including FDA-approved Xospata (aka gilteritinib) made by Japan-based Astellas Pharma, Eli Lily’s FDA-approved abemaciclib (Verzenio) and ralimetinib, and dasatinib, made by Bristol-Meyers Squibb.

Remember, the official narrative is that the virus – which specializes in infecting humans and packs ultra-rare ‘infection tentacles’ – did not emerge from a Chinese biolab located at ‘ground zero’ for the pandemic, where scientists had previously come under international scrutiny for conducting ‘gain of function’ experiments in which chimeric coronaviruses were genetically engineered for the sole purpose of infecting humans.

But we digress.

Authored by Anthony Watts via WattsUpWithThat.com,

A GLOBAL MAGNETIC ANOMALY:  On June 23rd, Earth’s quiet magnetic field was unexpectedly disturbed by a wave of magnetism that rippled around much of the globe. There was no solar storm or geomagnetic storm to cause the disturbance. So what was it?

The Sun today, cue ball blank. Image: NASA SDO

Lately, Earth’s magnetic field has been quiet. Very quiet. The sun is in the pits of what may turn out to be the deepest Solar Minimum in a century. Geomagnetic storms just aren’t happening.

“That’s why I was so surprised on June 23rd when my instruments picked up a magnetic anomaly,” reports Stuart Green, who operates a research-grade magnetometer in his backyard in Preston UK.

“For more than 30 minutes, the local magnetic field oscillated like a sine wave.”

This chart recording shows a magnetic wave rippling through Preston UK on June 23, 2020. Credit: Stuart Green.

Green quickly checked solar wind data from NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite.

“There was nothing – no uptick in the solar wind speed or other factors that might explain the disturbance,” he says.

He wasn’t the only one who noticed. In the Lofoten islands of Norway, Rob Stammes detected a similar anomaly on his magnetometer. “It was remarkable,” he says.

“Our magnetic field swung back and forth by about 1/3rd of a degree. I also detected ground currents with the same 10 minute period.”

What happened? Space physicists call this phenomenon a “pulsation continuous” or “Pc” for short. Imagine blowing across a piece of paper, making it flutter with your breath. Solar wind can have a similar effect on magnetic fields. Pc waves are essentially flutters propagating down the flanks of Earth’s magnetosphere excited by the breath of the sun. During more active phases of the solar cycle, these flutters are easily lost in the noise of rambunctious geomagnetic activity. But during the extreme quiet of Solar Minimum, such waves can make themselves “heard” like a pin dropping in an silent room.

Magnetic observatories around the world detected the wave on June 23, 2020. Credit: INTERMAGNET

Earth’s magnetic field was so quiet on June 23rd, the ripple was heard all around the world. INTERMAGNET‘s global network of magnetic observatories picked up wave activity at the same time from Hawaii to China to the Arctic Circle. There’s even a hint of it in Antarctica.

Pc waves are classified into 5 types depending on their period. The 10-minute wave on June 23rd falls into category Pc5. Slow Pc5 waves have been linked to a loss of particles from the van Allen radiation belts. Energetic electrons surf these waves down into Earth’s atmosphere, where they dissipate harmlessly.

With Solar Minimum in full swing, there’s never been a better time to study these waves. Keep quiet … and stay tuned for more.

Story from SpaceWeather.com it is well worth visiting this site

Even though by the start of this week India and China announced a cooling of tensions along the disputed Galwan Valley Line of Actual Control (LAC) border area, new satellite images have revealed a major military build-up especially by the Chinese side.

What was previously but a small, remote Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) outpost has grown huge in size after the June 15 nighttime clash which left 20 Indian soldiers said, many of them having fallen to their deaths during hand-to-hand combat from a precarious ridge line.

The satellite images produced by Maxar Technologies were taken Monday, reports CNN, and show that a week after the deadliest India-China border clash in half a century PLA forces had significantly expanded their encampment. 

The PLA has reportedly stationed tank and artillery units in the contested border region.

It was a day later on Tuesday that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian announced that talks between the two sides’ top regional commanders resulted in a positive breakthrough. They “agreed to take necessary measures to promote a cooling of the situation,” Zhao said.

Below: Before image showing the relatively empty area of what’s dubbed Patrol Point 14 in the Galwan Valley between May 22 and June 22 (compared to apparent build-up in same area shown above).

“The small outpost … has grown hugely in size,” the analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who first revealed the images, Nathan Ruser tweeted on Thursday. 

“Indian troops aren’t dismantling this one,” he added, emphasizing that the new PLA expanded camp appears permanent.

Satellite imagery from the Galwan Valley on June 22nd shows that ‘disengagement’ really isn’t the word that the government should be using. This gif shows the small outpost that sparked the June 15th clashes. It has grown hugely in size. Indian troops aren’t dismantling this one. pic.twitter.com/8Q78ftr3uW

— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) June 24, 2020

Though analysts say it’s clearly a PLA encampment, Indian media reports claimed that the Indian Army was in full control of the disputed Galwan Valley area in question. 

However, analysts say the new images refute those claims, as CNN reports:

The Maxar satellite photos released this week appear to show China has put a tank company and artillery units at a camp north of Gogra. Another significant base was shown in the Kongka Pass.

Ruser, in an analysis released before the latest satellite photos came out, said previous such photos showed Chinese troops have been regularly crossing the LAC on patrols into Indian territory — although not at the point of the June 15 clash — but that reports of thousands of Chinese troops encamped in Indian territory were unproven.

Analysts examining the new satellite photos further say that while the PLA presence has increased, the Indian Army appears to have drawn down from the immediate area of dispute.

China has reportedly moved about a thousand additional troops into the area after recent hostilities and spiking tensions.