I just returned from Orlando and the jam-packed ANA Masters of Marketing event. It’s so nice to have our conferences back and to be able to reconnect with so many colleagues, both old and new.
As you might expect, there was a lot of discussion about what was happening in the broader economy, how some of the big digital ad giants were faring, and the continued, strong growth of streaming TV advertising.
Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced a third-quarter revenue of 4% year over year — and, worse, a profit decline of 52%. Some Wall Street analysts have taken the company’s stock price targets down as much as 50%. Google’s YouTube ad revenue fell 2% year over year and the overall profit of Alphabet, its parent company, was down 24%, and its stock fell by almost 10% yesterday, which only looks good when considered relative to the 22.4% that Meta stock dropped.
But the industry wasn’t talking doom and gloom in Orlando. Actually, there was a lot more discussion about P&G’s earnings call last week, when its chief financial officer announced it was cutting back untargeted linear TV ad spend and planned to replace it with targeted, reach-optimised campaigns on streaming TV.
Yep, a long-time industry bell cow wants to lead the industry into the streaming ad world.
There are going to be some certain winners in this world — among them Amazon, Netflix, Roku and VIZIO. There are some companies for whom this might deliver mixed results, including TV companies like Disney, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery, all of which will both lose and gain some business,
And, clearly, there are some losers. Google’s YouTube should be a winner given its significant and growing viewership on connected TVs, but its ad revenue declines signal a broader vulnerability, probably to competition from TikTok.
Meta clearly has no play at this point in the streaming TV world.
Tweener TV companies are probably also going to be on the losing side, having neither the scale to build and optimize distribution and pricing of their own streaming programming, nor the niche positioning of some of the smaller companies that might be able to stand with groups of passionate super-users.
There seems to be no question that streaming TV advertising is in for a multiyear growth surge, but not everybody in the TV, video or digital ad ecosystem is going to benefit from it. What do you think?
This story was first published by MediaPost.com and is republished with the permission of the author.
Dave Morgan, a lawyer by training, is the CEO and founder of Simulmedia. He previously founded and ran both TACODA, Inc, an online advertising company that pioneered behavioural online marketing and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, Inc, one of the world’s first ad serving and online ad network companies and a predecessor to 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), which was later sold to WPP for $649 million. Follow him on Twitter @davemorgannyc
