In case you’re wondering, Department of the Obvious Senior Intern Jamie is safely sheltering in the attic. But he still keeps an eye on industry news and just shared this survey from marketing agency Element-R Partners, which found that 74% of marketers had changed or reduced activities during the pandemic. A majority (61%) were somewhat or highly annoyed by business-as-usual messages.

As it happens, brand risk fell in the second half of last year, according to Integral Ad Science. Viewability was up but fraud results were mixed: ad fraud rates rose for campaigns that were not optimized to prevent fraud and were roughly stable for campaigns that were.

YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.