Month: December 2019

As more viewers move from ad-supported TV to ad-free streamers like Netflix and Disney+ and ad-supported streamers serve fewer ads than TV, “there will be more demand than supply,” said Jeremy Cohen, vp and head of global content partnerships at Publicis Media.

More supply appears to be on the way. The April launch of NBCUniversal’s ad-supported streamer, Peacock, could help to open up more inventory, as would the work that Amazon and Roku are doing to add more programming to their respective ad-supported services IMDb TV and Roku Channel. But there remains so much early activity in the streaming market — with the dust still settling around Disney+ and HBO Max in the offing — that many advertisers are waiting to see how viewership shifts and habits take shape before making major money moves.

“The market as a whole is deliberately watching as services come to market and identify swim lanes for each brand before making a wholehearted investment into streaming,” said Cohen.

Even then advertisers are unlikely to wholly move their TV budgets to streaming. They don’t need to. Streaming services’ lighter ad loads and narrower targeting options enable advertisers to be more discerning with how they spend their dollars. “I don’t know if there is going to be as much money in [streaming] given the lighter ad load and greater targetability,” said Ed Gaffney, managing partner and director of implementation research at GroupM.

The lighter ad loads mean viewers are less likely to tune out during ad breaks — at least that’s what the streaming ad sellers say — and that means advertisers don’t feel a need to drown audiences in as many ads in order for their messages to break through. Similarly, streaming’s greater targeting means advertisers don’t have to run as many ads to reach as many people in their intended audience as they do on TV where they might advertise against a college football game in hopes that a significant enough share of the audience enjoys doing their own home improvements. “If you spend in a more targeted way, your out-of-pocket [cost] is less,” Gaffney said.

Advertisers may be pressed to take greater advantage of targeting next year to keep their costs in check as political advertisers enter the fold. The additional competition for relatively scarce inventory “could indeed plague pricing a little bit,” said Philip Inghelbrecht, CEO of TV and connected TV ad buying firm Tatari.

“This is the first time we’ve had a political season where the scales are leaning more towards [streaming] than linear. No one really knows if there’s enough inventory,” said another agency exec.

Apple News+ is not going to rally
A fresh coat of paint is usually not enough to fix a flawed product. And Apple News+, for all the hype that surrounded its launch in 2019, is still basically the same thing as Texture, which struggled for years to build a scaled audience when it was owned by a conglomeration of magazine publishers. The innate distribution advantage that Apple promised to take advantage of hasn’t helped much so far, and it’s unlikely to get much marketing help from publisher participants, many of which have their own subscriptions they’d rather sell first. Add in the fact that many participants, who had no choice but to try Apple News+ thanks to pre-existing Texture contracts, can opt out, and Apple’s second foray into paid content products looks like it might not go great. — Max Willens

Facebook won’t stick to its guns on political advertising
Political spending on online ads is projected by consulting firm Borrell Associates to reach $2.9 billion in 2020. That’s more than double the spent on digital ads by political campaigns in 2016. With platforms from Twitter to TikTok outright banning political advertising and Google placing limits on the targeting of such ads, you can bet your bottom dollar Facebook will receive the lion’s share of that spending.

Facebook has been the outlier in not only allowing political ads to run on its platforms, but by refusing to fact-check the statements made within them, stoking controversy in some political circles (and praise from others). Still, Facebook can do without such baggage as it faces both state and federal investigations in Washington. As political spending ramps up over 2020, bad actors will no doubt look to again sew discord and misinformation. 

While Facebook executives reportedly lack consensus over its political ads policies, soon something will probably have to give. Targeting, particularly the much maligned “micro targeting,” seems likely to be the first — maybe only — shoe to drop. — Lara O’Reilly

Netflix will not introduce an ad-supported tier
Like Gretchen Wieners with “fetch,” advertisers have tried to will an ad-supported Netflix into existence. On paper the rationale makes sense. Netflix needs to add subscribers to stave off the likes of Disney+ and HBO, and a cheaper, ad-supported tier could be the ticket. Netflix’s content costs are weighing down its bottom line, and a high-margin business like advertising could lift its prospects. But these arguments ignore not only Netflix execs’ proclamations just this year that the service will never add ads — though it wouldn’t be the first company to change its mind because money (remember Tumblr?) — but the upfront costs required for Netflix to stand up an advertising business. Besides, with the product placement deals Netflix has been negotiating to alleviate its programs’ production costs, advertising would only undermine the money it can get from advertisers who can’t advertise. — Tim Peterson

Shared ID solutions will not replace cookies
There was a lot of hype over so-called shared ID solutions in 2019. While the idea of shared user IDs has been around for several years, interest in them piqued this year amid the industry’s scramble to find ways to identify audiences online in a data-privacy compliant way that won’t get overturned by any further anti-tracking changes made by the browsers. The rationale was to have one shared ID that large swathes of companies in the ecosystem could transact on instead of having different identifiers or third-party cookies that need to be matched. In a world where it’s getting harder to use those sorts of cookies, shared IDs represented an alternative. But shared IDs aren’t the answer to life after the cookie. In fact, they are still reliant on cookies, which is why the DigiTrust shared ID was blocked from the Firefox browser in November. Any ID solution based on cookies, which many of them are, won’t cut it in the long-run. — Seb Joseph

Congress will not pass a federal privacy law
Ever since the California Consumer Privacy Act passed into law in June 2018, the advertising industry has held out hope for Congress to pass a federal privacy law that would prevent companies from having to comply with a patchwork of state-specific privacy laws. Not gonna happen. Not in an election year. Not with Democrats and Republicans still divided over whether a federal privacy law should or should not preempt states’ privacy laws. Not when only within the last month,  members of Congress have introduced two bills that disagree on important points like whether individuals should be able to sue companies over privacy violations. For Congress to pass a federal privacy law, it would first need to agree on a bill to put up to a vote. — Tim Peterson

Big tech won’t get broken up
This was the year that the rallying cry to regulate tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google got too loud to ignore. Warily viewed by industry onlookers as a thinly-veiled example of European protectionism, the once-unthinkable idea of breaking up Google and others for anti-competitive reasons migrated to the U.S. But beyond powerful political rhetoric, bringing legal cases to break up companies are expensive, complicated and often yield disappointing results. Splitting Google into different businesses ignores how interconnected the models are, its free Android business props up products like Maps and Gmail, for instance. Withering these products isn’t in the consumer’s best interest. Unwinding past acquisitions, like Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, is easier in cases where companies haven’t blended them internally, and Facebook is busy working out how to knit Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram closer together. Complications aside, a company split into smaller entities won’t prevent it from carrying out over-surveillance on its customers or better respect user privacy. — Lucinda Southern

Twitter’s Bluesky won’t get much traction
In December, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the launch of Bluesky, his idealistic vision for social media to, essentially, heal itself by making social media operate more like email does: to be decentralized so that anyone can communicate with one another, no matter which network they happen to be using. Dorsey has hired a team of “five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.” The implications could be far reaching, curtailing the types of recommended content we see on social media and possibly even making it easier to restrict hate speech or other forms of abuse that take place on these platforms. However, the biggest hurdle will be whether Dorsey can convince the other social media platforms, especially Facebook, to sign on. Given their shared history, that might be even harder to do than actually turning Bluesky into a reality.  — Deanna Ting

Tribune Publishing will not escape the jaws of Alden Global Capital
Despite public entreaties from Tribune columnists, open letters from staffers imploring the Tribune Publishing board to find a new owner and journalism watchers wishing and hoping for a different outcome, hedge fund Alden Global Capital will buy up more shares of Tribune Publishing next summer, when an agreement that prevents Alden from increasing its 32% stake in the news publisher expires. The biggest reason for pessimism arrived at the beginning of December, when Tribune announced it would expand its board from six members to eight, with two new seats going to Alden allies. The fact that Alden didn’t pay extra for the privilege — and no other owners get two seats — suggests Alden will get what it wants, and the board is resigned to it. — Max Willens

Influencers and influencer marketing aren’t going away…
But influencers can’t keep using the same playbook that they have for the past few years. Highly edited, beautifully captured Instagram photos don’t cut it anymore. Instead, the most prized and most successful influencers will be those who can also be creative and entertaining. It’s why Snapchat is investing so heavily in its AR lens creators, and why, to be famous in TikTok, it’s more about how innovative and entertaining you can be in the short-form video format. — Deanna Ting 

Brands won’t actually reduce digital spending
In 2019, the efficacy of digital was questioned once again. Brands like Adidas, Old Navy and Top Shop, among others, stated publicly their media mixes were too digital-heavy and that they were often relying too heavily on performance marketing rather than brand building. While that may be true, it’s unlikely that marketers will actually reel in how much they spend on digital. As marketers scramble to prove their worth — marketing is typically first on the chopping block for C-Suite execs looking to squeeze out any fat — it’s easy to see why they’d want to allocate their budgets to areas that are actually trackable and attributable. The so-called “brand building” marketing that industry analysts say brands need to focus on aren’t as easily trackable and attributable and don’t help marketers prove their worth. We live in a short-term, results-oriented business world and, while that style of thinking may have long-term negative effects on brands, those who run marketing for those brands are typically only at the helm for roughly 18-months. Until that changes, digital spending will likely continue to reign supreme. — Kristina Monllos 

CMOs will not be scrapped
It’s an interesting time to be a CMO. On the one hand there are businesses like McDonald’s, which have scrapped the position and passed its remit on to less senior, non C-suite execs. On the other hand, there are businesses that think CMOs need a broader set of skills in order to understand platforms and operations as well as to unpick what is an increasingly complicated full customer view. Regardless of the viewpoint, there’s a general consensus that the CMO role has become increasignly broad. That’s pushed some observers to suggest whether the role is still needed. Coca-Cola, which knows a thing or two about marketing, decided it didn’t need a CMO in 2017 but then brought back at the end of 2019. The reversal suggests that planning for the CMO role is a challenge of positioning and branding. Ironically, this is just the sort of problem a CMO could probably help with. — Seb Joseph

Ana Milicevic, co-founder at digital advisory firm Sparrow Advisers

Your new year’s resolution for consultants in 2020?
Own who you are: the acquisitions some consulting companies have been making are turning them more into the holding companies they’re battling against. Knowing whom to bring on for the type of problem you have is key: and with that the understanding on the client side that it’s not just enough to hire a consultant, but to hire the right ones. Recycling old one-size-fits-all advice from dusty decks just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Your personal resolution for 2020?
I have two: this year I keynoted six international conferences and would like to at least keep that same number next year. It’s the kind of work that I really enjoy and hope to do much more of in the future. The other one may seem more mundane in comparison: I’ve taken up knitting. As a computer scientist I can appreciate how similar interpreting knitting patterns and constructing designs is to software development. I’m enjoying discovering an entirely new hobby immensely and learning something new from scratch. Knitters of media industries, send me your patterns!

Mark Evans, managing director of marketing and digital at U.K. insurance company Direct Line Group

What is your new year’s resolution for the marketing industry in 2020?
I think for many, the focus on building for the long-term is the obvious one. I talk to CMOs, senior ones, who are in their first year in the role and — particularly if you’re not in a professional marketing organization — the first year is about immediate impact and profit. You spend 90% of your time pulling at levers to get legitimacy but the very notion of doing that can undermine your ability to pull out of that nosedive. You need a bit of luck, perseverance and cunning to [get past] that short-term survival [mode,] but don’t neglect the long term. There are a ton of people saying that, but practically that means having tougher conversations early on to make sure the standing of marketing is built. There are many marketers who inadvertently got their boards and [senior management] hooked on the wrong metrics and unpicking that is quite hard.

What’s your personal resolution for 2020?
I’m running my first marathon in April. It’s been on my bucket list forever. Just six months ago I was promoted to the executive committee, which is a big commitment, so perhaps it’s not perfect timing. That’s a bit of a lightning rod for keeping things sensible and balanced.

Ryan McConville, evp of ad platforms and operations at NBUniversal Advertising & Partnerships

What’s your New Year’s resolution for media measurement?
With content available on so many platforms, each with different standards, it’s hard for marketers to measure the true impact of their advertising dollars in an apples to apples way. In 2020, we’d like to see the industry continue to embrace more cross platform standardization of how we count and measure impressions, so we can start to really look at “total video” delivery and impact. We’ve already taken the first step in this journey by creating CFlight, the industry’s first cross-platform unified advertising metric. That means one plan, one currency, one guarantee across every viewing platform. Beyond 2020, we want to go even further than unified impressions, to impact, and eventually true ROI. We’re going beyond legacy metrics to deliver clients the most comprehensive representation of their ad exposures.

What’s your own personal New Year’s resolution?
I am a first time dad and my son just turned three. So I am figuring out how to manage a “three-nager” – a subject matter much more complex than ad tech.

Shawn Riegsecker, CEO at ad tech company Centro

Your resolution for the ad tech industry in 2020?
That the industry turns its attention away from its singular focus on programmatic and starts to focus on enterprise-level automation. Outside of financial services, it would be harder to find a more complex and difficult industry experiencing this level of rapid change and disruption. As digital becomes more complex and difficult, combined with brands paying agencies less or taking digital in-house, media agencies will be forced to automate significant aspects of their operations in order to reduce costs and maintain profitability margins.

Your resolution for the media industry in 2020?
To start paying more attention to the mental and emotional well-being of the people working in our industry. The average ad industry worker is drowning, overly stressed and feeling like they’re not meeting the expectations of their clients or their managers. We spend too much time talking about technology and nowhere near enough time talking about how we can improve the quality of life for people in advertising. Ad technologies are fun and exciting to discuss but if the people behind the terminals aren’t happy and healthy, the entire industry suffers.

Tanya Brookfield, CEO at creative agency Elvis

What’s your new year’s resolution for creative agencies in 2020?
To continue to invest in talent and raise industry standards of how we treat our people – after all, we’re nothing without them.

What is your resolution for CMOs and marketing leaders in 2020?
We ask our clients to demand unexpected and unforgettable work from us. I would implore all marketing leaders to be relentless in the pursuit of the highest levels of creativity from your agencies. And when you see it, recognise the value of it.

Natascha Chamuleau, vp of global ad sales at WeTransfer

What’s your new year’s resolution for marketing leaders in 2020?
In 2020, I’m challenging myself and CMOs and marketing leads to think creatively, to bring brands’ visions to life in more beautiful and inspiring ways. I hope to move the industry forward by developing ads that are fun, interactive, and make users excited to engage with. Whether it’s voice, video or digital advertising, there will be a unique opportunity for marketing teams to put creativity at the forefront of our campaigns in the year ahead.

What’s your personal new year’s resolution for 2020?
In 2020, I will become a mentor again. It is so great to see people grow by helping them define their strengths, achieve their goals and share the knowledge that you take for granted.