Abstract:

This paper aims to present selected results from a wider investigation based on advertising communication and marketing and its impact during the pandemic. Covid-19 has brought up huge consequences, in particular all the safety measures adopted to contain the spread of the virus changed habits and everyday life. To carry on with their lives, despite staying at home, everyone needed to move all the activities online, through the virtualization. A big improvement of digitalization allowed people to continue their activities, but has also contributed to move social relationships online, facing to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Advertising and Marketing changed way to communicate, to meet their target’s new needs and desires.

The wider study integrates two data sources:
- 103 advertising messages spread during (9th March -18th May) and after the Italian Lockdown from different channels, including: e-mail marketing, social media, press and TV in various sectors: Tourism, Mobility and Education. These sources (23 dedicated to Education) have been categorized based on: date, sectors, enterprises, channels used, strategies adopted, communication objectives, text and images present in the message, emotions and perceptions that the sender wanted to convey.
- Information about the emotional and pragmatic impact of those messages presenting a survey to 60 people for each sector (180 total), with an initial focus on Tourism sector, currently extended to the other two sectors, investigating also how their habits have changed since the advent of Covid-19.

After the data collection, lexical and statistical analyses were conducted with two main tools: IRAMUTEQ Software for Descending Hierarchical Classification and Specificities and Correspondence Analysis on the advertising messages; Excel for statistical and descriptive analysis, to identify the frequencies of specific elements in the answers of the survey; the data related to the emotions evoked by the messages presented were categorised and analysed with a polarity index, to better determine the level of positive and negative emotions associated to those specific messages.

From IRAMUTEQ analysis emerged 5 main clusters:
1. Safety Measures;
2. Inclusive Personalization You-We;
3. Tourism Dream;
4. Flexibility and Discount;
5. E-Learning and Resilience Challenges for Vulnerable Communities.

While the 5 clusters’ results show that Advertising Communication has radically changed in all sectors after the spread of Covid-19, the fifth cluster - centered on e-learning - shows that the digital transformation into the education sector during Coronavirus. The communication used to promote international events and webinars leveraged on distance learning used a lot of texts and few images, mainly representing one happy person in front of computer, or speaker’s picture. Texts did not focus on traditional scholastic dimension, but highlighted that e-Learning is a way to contrast vulnerabilities, enhancing the resilience of people belonging to marginal communities and contexts, such as Africa for example. Digitalization and e-Learning are shown as big opportunity to reduce the distance between people all around the world and to access to infinite amount of knowledge, right from home.

The challenge is to enhance the resilience of vulnerable students during the transition to online and distance education, leading them into the new normal to take advantage of all the opportunities that it offers.

Keywords:

Education and Virtualization, Advertising Communication, Marketing, Coronavirus, Vulnerable Students, Resilience Challenges.