I spent this week listening to a lot of talk about TV and video advertising – and doing my own talking as well.
First I was at the always excellent, intimate MediaPost TV & Video Summit in Nashville; then in Orlando, Florida at the Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing, attended by about 2 300 in person.
Several themes around TV advertising resonated that came up over and over at both events:
- Audience fragmentation across streaming and linear TV is really bad, and getting worse
- There is too much wasted ad frequency on both steaming and linear TV
- Almost no one is able to run truly integrated streaming and linear TV ad campaigns
- Fraud, bots and mislabeled outstream video are real problems in CTV today
- The opacity of many streaming video ad platforms is creating real trust issues among buyers.
Yep, the consensus out there is that TV advertising in its current state is a mess. Fixable? Yes. But a mess, for sure.
So, how are we going to fix it? Here are five steps we can take:
Care. Too many in our industry operate out of willful ignorance. We need to stop that. Everyone with their heads in the sand needs to step up and care, ask questions and demand answers — repeatedly if necessary.
Use data and act empirically. Lots of people like to talk about leveraging big data and AI — and then make decisions on their gut feelings and historical dispositions. Truly adopting data-informed decision-making is easy to talk about, but hard to do. Now is the time to start doing hard things.
Demand transparency. If platforms are not reporting on the content, the episodes, the services, the apps and the platforms upon which your ads appear, there’s probably a reason — and it’s probably not a good one for you.
Cross-channel training and fluency. Most digital ad buyers don’t understand how linear TV works. Most linear TV ad buyers don’t understand how streaming and digital ads work. Neither is going away any time soon, and the future of streaming TV ads is certain to carry forward some key parts of the linear TV ad world.
Demand integration. Most streaming TV viewers also watch lots of linear TV, so the ads on each need to work together and not at cross purposes. Streaming and linear TV advertising can be planned, bought and measured in truly integrated ways. Now is the time to demand this.
Are you ready to help fix the world of streaming and linear TV advertising?
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
