Month: January 2024

Although it still is posting modest viewing, professional football
games on network television will again make a run for viewers during the spring.

A new league is starting up — again. The United Football League (UFL) — a merger of
the XFL and USFL to be called the UFL — is owned by an investment group fronted by actor/producer Dwayne Johnson, a former wannabe football player who didn’t quite make it into the college or
professional game.

The underlying premise that continues to push these businesses along is competitive, underserved players — mostly not drafted in the bigger NFL league — as potential
storylines for the marketing of the league. 

Decades-long efforts of competitors looking to compete with the NFL have risen and fallen through over the years in attempts to get a firm
footing on network schedules and with viewers.

If that does not tell you something, here’s this: In 2023, USFL viewership across all games was down 16% from its debut season to 601,000. It was
also 3% lower than the XFL’s first season despite having more favorable distribution, according to Sports Business Journal. 

In addition, the USFL Championship game was down 24%
to 1.2 million viewers on NBC. By way of comparison, the XFL championship game was not much better that year — 1.4 million viewers.

So why continue? Because if there is even a glimmer of hope
that TV networks can succeed in a burgeoning streaming world — where viewers can pick and choose what they want, when they want — it continues to be in the hands of those potential new and existing
sports programmers.

Professional football is, of course, the obvious sports choice — as the NFL continues to dominate TV network airwaves with programming content that regularly delivers
around 17 million average viewers a game — considerably higher than the one or two TV network scripted entertainment series that can post, at best, 9 million to 10 million or so viewers per
episode.

Even then, viewers can go to their favorite streamer the next day to view that content.

The NFL itself can only seemingly expand by just so much in its traditional time period
of the fall/winter — although it also attempted through a number of deals to expand in the spring, including  “developmental” leagues. 

It did so briefly with NFL Europe
in the 1990s and early 2000s, but closed due to ongoing financial losses of around $30 million. More recently, the NFL reportedly was looking at another project in 2016 and 2017, which then seemingly
fizzled out. 

Proponents might say spring scheduled, European-based, or development leagues still have some potential now — more than years ago — because of dramatically declining
viewership due to cord-cutting. Add in the potential for that live TV viewing commands a premium for TV advertisers.

But the push actually comes from the NFL itself — which continues to see
ratings continuing to inch up higher each year over the past few seasons —  up 10% this season so far to average 17.9 million viewers.

That alone keeps potential football programming
upstarts going for the end zone.

To the clouds! While that may sound like a superhero catchphrase, it was actually the de facto motto of mar tech and ad tech in 2023. The deification of data clean rooms, the need for privacy compliance and this year’s generative AI explosion were just a few of the trends pushing businesses away from owning […]

The post The Year Ad Tech Went To The Cloud appeared first on AdExchanger.

Ad revenue in the US is set to grow in 2024. So pour one out for 2023 – and try not to make the same mistake as last year. Despite a more-than-decent ad market in 2023, media executives nearly manifested a recession out of fear that one was coming, according to professional advertising prognosticator Brian Wieser, […]

The post Don’t Talk Yourself Into A Downturn In 2024 appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. In Services To Who? Apple’s Services revenue – made up of its subscription businesses and the triple-tithe fee on iOS developer earnings – is at risk in 2024, writes the Financial Times. Apple’s Services biz kept overall growth pumping despite a slowdown in […]

The post Apple Services Revenue Is Under Fire; Streaming Enters Its Next Battle appeared first on AdExchanger.

Podcast execs weren’t shy about how difficult of a year it was for their businesses, facing advertising slowdowns and the challenges associated with a maturing medium.

Despite the ghost of 2023 following them into the new year, heads of podcasts at five companies were optimistic about 2024 when speaking with Digiday, sharing positive signals of continued audience growth, new advertising dollars coming into the medium and opportunities to expand shows into franchises.

But they still face stiff competition as podcast networks fight to gain listeners and push into video to grow the reach of their content.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Ad spending is bouncing back, but TV advertising isn’t sharing the spotlight.

Despite broadcasters’ efforts to revamp and embrace new technology, their attempts seem to be falling short. TV ad spending in the third quarter made that all too clear. 

Warner Bros, Discovery, Comcast, Fox, Paramount — all these big players experienced significant dips in ad spending. Even the media powerhouse Disney felt the pinch, watching its traditional TV ad revenue dwindle due to fewer ads and viewership.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

If you talk to advertisers about the strategy behind whatever it is they’re doing now, you’ll often hear that they want their brands to be a part of culture and what they’re doing will help them get there. How they plan to get their brands to be a part of culture will vary, of course, but the gist is usually something like, they can’t rely on the tried and true tactics that worked for the traditional advertising models given consumption habits have changed. Instead, they need to break through the noise and truly connect with consumers.

It makes sense. Consumption habits are changing. Getting people to pay attention to traditional advertising is getting more difficult. Marketers are having to spend more time determining how to talk to consumers, especially younger consumers, who don’t want to hear from brands. So major marketers like Coca-Cola have transformed their advertising strategies to move away from “the interruption model to experience and engagement,” Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s senior director of generative AI, previously told Digiday.

It seems that advertisers don’t want to be advertisers at all anymore. Or maybe it’s not that they don’t want to — apologies for the double negative, roll with it — but that they recognize they can’t simply be advertisers anymore. And rather than have their brand content peppered around something that people want to engage with only to have people be annoyed by the brand for interrupting that engagement, marketers want their brands to be producing the thing that people want to engage with now.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

For many brands, gaming is still an experimental marketing channel — but Gillette is all-in on the sector going into the new year. 

Gillette is in the midst of a push into the gaming community, in large part via a marketing campaign the shaving brand has dubbed “Hit Reset with Gillette.” The campaign includes collaborations with a network of gaming streamers and influencers, a sponsorship of Twitch’s Twitch Rivals content series and a partnership with November’s Esports Awards.

“It was a fantastic partnership all in all, and I’m really looking forward to growing it in 2024, as they are doing more and more in the gaming space,” said Esports Awards head of brand engagement Lee Cramp.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at some of the top trends and developments to keep an eye on in 2024.

• The year-in-preview
• YouTube as streaming’s pied piper, the rise of AI-generated influencers and more

The year-in-preview

Happy New Year. How happy this year will be for the TV, streaming and digital video industry will remain to be seen, though.

This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.

The problems with investing media dollars through programmatic means are well documented, the most recent example being the ANA’s study released in December. Still, despite these issues, the marketing and media worlds continue to invest more and more via programmatic means. Why is that? 

One media agency network, Omnicom Media Group (OMG), argues it’s just a matter of paying attention to the problems and being more careful in how you invest your clients’ dollars programmatically. By using its own standards, as well as those of the ANA, OMG delivered results for its clients that it said outperformed the averages the ANA study revealed. 

Under the umbrella of its Council on Accountability and Standards in Advertising (CASA), last fall OMG formed an initiative that aimed to standardize and align the buy and sell sides of programmatic investment. Led by Ryan Eusanio, managing director of digital activation, OMG is working with six major SSPs to help align their common interests, including Magnite, Index Exchange, Google Ad Manager, Pubmatic, Freewheel and Microsoft’s Xandr. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.