Fragmentation has meant the whole world has changed for audiences and advertisers. An ever-growing range of emerging streaming services, from Paramount+ to Peacock, have joined a constellation of long-time players, leading to a wealth of programming options for consumers and brands. Meanwhile, audiences are using more devices than ever to consume all the programming available to them.
The more the TV audience is fragmented, the more difficult innovation, evolution and growth will be without solutions that resolve this fragmentation for advertisers.
Why? For while each of the players must serve their own audiences and their own advertisers, the progress of the industry can also depend on a cohesive effort involving all parties if necessary. Here are the four areas where TV advertising industry experts aim to drive growth in the space.
1. Measurement
Audience engagement has changed dramatically — from the rise of digital devices to the explosion of streaming options — and yet measurement processes haven’t necessarily kept up with those changes, said Monique Nelson, CEO of the marketing agency UWG. “Measurement needs to be as dynamic as our industry, just as dynamic as the brands we serve,” she said. “It’s time to innovate, which means we need more people at the party to achieve a more elegant result.”
Shreya Kushari, chief account officer of communications agency OMD USA, also noted that traditional ways of measuring consumer experiences need to evolve. “It can’t just be panel-based, where it takes seven months to a year to find out the impact,” she said. “We just have to go faster and with more precision.”
DirecTV is a company that has been providing solutions, including offering an addressable product and print warranty for over a decade. “It’s really exciting right now because there are so many different additional options, but we need a partnership across the ecosystem, between the buy side and the sell side, to make this scalable,” said said Amy Leifer, Director of Advertising Sales at DirecTV.
2. Addressability
Addressability is a solution in development that is set to become widely available to advertisers, according to Larry Allen, vice president and general manager of addressable activation at Comcast Advertising. “We all need to be able to work together [to] really creating value for our customers and creating an opportunity for everyone to benefit from television. »
Finding industry solutions is important when working for any agency and with any brand, said Jason Kanefsky, managing partner of market intelligence at Havas Media. “It matters to P&G, and it matters to smaller accounts, whether you’re spending $1, $100 million, or $4 billion,” he said. “So having the collective put in the resources for us all to be successful is in the best interests of the entire industry and the consumers we’re trying to reach for television.”
Gina Mingioni, senior vice president of strategy and operations at Comcast Advertising, noted that with the fragmentation of television and the multitude of different processes and technologies, the industry must strive to reduce friction and extend addressability. This comes in the form of different technologies that can interact with each other and work to identify existing common areas.
“You think of something like programmers being addressably enabled across multiple distributors, but they have different processes, they might have different SLAs,” she explained. “So how can we find areas that remove these frictions and simplify transactions? Because we need it to be able to scale up.
3. Data activation
As Leifer said, advertisers want to reach their targets, not a variety of consumers who will never buy their products. “Right now, when we finally have the ability to aggregate data in a meaningful way, we can partner with any agency and any advertiser on all of these platforms using incredible technologies,” said she declared.
The industry needs to move beyond traditional methods of buying and targeting audiences, according to Kushari. As she explained, “we need to look at behaviors and not just demographics. And that can only happen if we look at addressable audiences and say there’s a better way to measure, there’s a better way to target. »
4. Innovation
It’s safe to say that industry players on all sides are focused on innovation. As Mark McKee, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Freewheel put it, “The antidote to fragmentation must be collaboration but, more specifically, unification,” added. “How do buyers and sellers talk to each other, interact and work together? »
While every client and agency needs to think about innovation to drive their own business forward, whether it’s innovation in measurement, programming, or another area, the industry can benefit from a vision of its direction, Kanefsky said. “Each client and each agency has to have their own point of view, but it has to work within the collective,” he said, “because otherwise none of us accomplish anything.”
