From the Performance Marketing Insider archive. Originally published August 2020. Revisited October 2026.

Why Evergreen Messages Fail During COVID-19

Somber piano, empty streets, "we're here for you." By spring 2020 every brand had made the same ad, and someone cut them all together to prove it.

By Pesach Lattin

This post first ran on Performance Marketing Insider (performinsiders.com), the affiliate and lead generation trade site Pesach Lattin published from 2011 to 2020. The original text was lost when that site went dark. This page sits at the same address the old links point to, keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

By the spring of 2020, the pandemic ad had become its own genre. Somber piano. Workers looking into the camera. "In these uncertain times." "We're here for you." A YouTube supercut titled "Every COVID-19 Commercial Is Exactly the Same" made the point better than any research deck, and trade press picked it up in May 2020.

What the research actually said

Kantar surveyed more than 25,000 consumers in 30 markets in March 2020. Only 8% said brands should stop advertising. Most wanted ads about how the brand was helping in daily life and what it was doing, and a reassuring tone. 75% said brands should not exploit the crisis, and 40% said avoid humor.

Then Kantar re-tested ten pre-crisis ads and found about 95% of their measures unchanged. Gentle humor still worked. A wipes ad did better because it looked like the brand's earlier ads and did not mention COVID at all.

So which messages failed?

That is the useful nuance under this headline. What failed was not the evergreen brand message. It was the generic crisis message, the one that could have come from any brand because it came from every brand. Ads that sounded like the brand still worked. Ads that sounded like the moment all sounded like each other.

How it aged

"In these uncertain times" became a permanent industry joke and a standard case study in category sameness. The lesson for every crisis since is the one the data showed in 2020: consistency beats solemnity, and the fastest way to disappear is to say what everyone else is saying in the same voice.

This page rebuilds an August 2020 Performance Marketing Insider post whose original text is not available. Facts come from Kantar's March and April 2020 releases and AdNews. The "identical ads" point rests on a widely shared supercut and press commentary, not a formal study; the page says so.