What global conflict actually does to consumer behaviour, and why your impressions are lying to you.

 

Right now, millions of people are opening Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook not to browse, not to discover, not to shop, but to watch a war unfold in real time. The feed has become a conflict zone. And somewhere between the footage and the outrage, your ad for a new jacket is loading.
 
Most brands don’t talk about this. Most agencies don’t either. But if you’re running paid media during a period of global conflict, you need to understand what’s happening inside the mind of the person scrolling past your ad, because the data alone won’t tell you.

 

The Doomscroll Paradox

 

Here’s the counterintuitive bit: social media usage goes up during conflict. Screen time increases. Sessions get longer. People refresh feeds compulsively, looking for the latest update, the next piece of footage, the hottest take.
 
We saw this play out in real time. During escalations in the Middle East conflict, Elon Musk reported record usage on X for two consecutive days. People weren’t logging on to shop or discover new brands. They were glued to live updates, arguments, and footage. And you can bet the same behaviour was playing out across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and every other platform with a feed. Sessions were longer. Attention was higher. But it was attention pointed at crisis, not commerce.
 
There’s even a term for it now. “Monitoring the situation” has become its own meme, with posts racking up hundreds of thousands of views from people openly admitting they’re addicted to refreshing the feed for the latest developments. People are joking about it, but the behaviour underneath is real: they’re spending hours on platforms, glued to screens, consuming content at a pace they never normally would. The usage numbers look incredible. The purchase intent behind them is close to zero.

 

 

From a platform data perspective, this looks like opportunity. More eyeballs, more impressions, more reach. But reach without receptivity is waste.
 
Here’s what’s actually happening on the other side of that impression: consumers are not casually browsing. They’re not relaxed. They’re not even passively doomscrolling. They are frantically refreshing the feed, hunting for the next update, scanning for breaking news. They’re using Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook the way they’d use a live news ticker. The platform hasn’t changed, but the way people are using it has changed completely. They’re not in the market for anything. They’re in the market for information.
 
And that means your ad isn’t being passively ignored. It’s being actively skipped. It’s an obstacle between the user and the next piece of news they’re looking for. The scroll speed is faster. The tolerance for anything that isn’t what they came for is lower. Your ad doesn’t just fail to convert. It barely registers. Because in that moment, the consumer isn’t a consumer at all. They’re a news audience using a commerce platform.
 
The platforms don’t distinguish between these states. An impression is an impression. A served ad is a served ad. But the human on the other end? They’re somewhere else entirely.

 

The Emotional Contamination Effect

 

There’s a well-documented phenomenon in consumer psychology called mood congruence. The idea that your emotional state at the point of exposure shapes how you process what you see next. If someone has just watched thirty seconds of conflict footage, the next thing they see inherits that emotional residue. Your brand doesn’t land in a vacuum. It lands in the psychological aftermath of whatever came before it in the feed.
 
Research consistently shows that ads placed adjacent to distressing content experience lower recall, lower engagement, and in some cases, negative brand association. Not because the ad was bad, but because the context was hostile to commercial messaging. The consumer didn’t reject your creative. They rejected the timing.
 
And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: for certain categories (fashion, luxury, lifestyle, anything positioned around aspiration or indulgence) the contrast between the content and the ad can feel actively tone-deaf. The consumer doesn’t just scroll past. They notice. And not in the way you want.

 

The Cheap CPM Trap

 
During periods of conflict, a predictable pattern emerges in the ad auction. Large brand advertisers pull spend. They do this for PR reasons, brand safety policies, or genuine ethical concern. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that when big budgets leave the auction, CPMs drop. Impressions get cheaper.
 
Some operators see this as opportunity. Cheaper traffic. More reach per pound. Time to lean in.
 
But cheaper impressions delivered to psychologically unavailable consumers are not a bargain. They’re waste at a discount. Your CPM might drop, but if your click-through rate craters and your conversion rate softens, you haven’t saved money. You’ve just spent it more slowly on the same nothing. The efficiency gain is an illusion unless the consumer at the other end is actually receptive to commercial messaging. And during peak conflict coverage, many of them simply aren’t.

 

Consumer Confidence and the Spending Pause

 

Beyond the feed itself, there’s a broader behavioural shift that kicks in during sustained geopolitical instability. Consumer confidence dips, even among people who aren’t directly affected. This isn’t always rational. It’s emotional contagion. When the world feels unstable, people instinctively tighten. Discretionary purchases get delayed. The “I’ll think about it” window stretches. Basket sizes shrink. The add-to-cart still happens, but the checkout completion falters.
 
This is especially pronounced in the UK, where consumers are already navigating cost-of- living pressure. Add geopolitical anxiety on top of economic anxiety, and you get a compounding effect on willingness to spend, particularly on non-essential goods. The purchase intent is still there in theory. But the activation energy required to complete it has increased.
 

The Feed Shapes the Mood. The Mood Shapes the Outcome.

 

This isn’t an article about what to do. There’s no clean playbook for advertising during a humanitarian crisis, and anyone offering one is selling certainty that doesn’t exist.
 
This is about knowing what you’re looking at.
 
Because the most dangerous thing a brand can do during these periods isn’t spending too much or too little. It’s misdiagnosing the data. Your CAC spikes for two to three days and you restructure the account. Your conversion rate softens and you blame the creative. Your ROAS dips and you pull budget from the one channel that was still finding new customers. Every one of those is a reasonable reaction if you don’t understand the environment. And every one of them makes the problem worse.
 
We talk endlessly about what’s happening inside the ad account. CPMs, CTRs, ROAS, attribution windows. But the ad account exists inside a feed. And the feed exists inside a cultural moment. When that moment is defined by conflict, grief, and uncertainty, the numbers behave differently. Not because your strategy broke, but because the context shifted beneath it.

 
The skill isn’t having a crisis playbook. It’s having the awareness to separate what’s happening in the world from what’s happening in your business, so you respond to the right problem. Most brands don’t get this wrong because they lack tactics. They get it wrong because they never stopped to ask why the numbers moved in the first place.
 
Behind every impression is a person. And right now, that person’s headspace matters more than your media plan.