Streaming was supposed to signal the end of interruptive advertising - but interruption won
The revenge of the TV ad and other top 2022 stories that mattered
Perhaps the biggest story in advertising and media in 2022 was the comeback of the TV commercial.
Just a few years ago, The Age of Interruption was being declared dead. Everything is on demand. A generation raised to Netflix and Chill, with the ability to stream every song ever on Spotify ever would never tolerate ads again, and we’d all have to find ways to bake secret ad messages into content or influencer videos to every reach these spoiled kids.
Oops.
Perhaps the biggest shocker of the year (1) was Netflix, which denied it would ever run ads more than Trump denied the election results, flip flopping and caving into running ads. That followed HBO’s push into advertising earlier in the year (also a shocker), then then led to Disney+ with ads, Amazon’s FreeVee and a coming Warner Discovery free ad platform. Pluto, Paramount’s ad-heavy streaming service even cracked the Nielsen charts
“It’s predictable,” said The Rebooting’s founder Brian Morrissey, during our annual year-end podcast. “It works. You can predict your growth. All this stuff about invitational advertising…it’s predictable. You can’t run a business this way. All these complaints about the GRP, and CPG brands are like, ‘whatever’.”
Plus, it turns out that big media companies need money, and two revenue streams are better than one.
Of course, itt’s not just CTV. YouTube has run pre-rolls forever, and Snap, Instagram, TikTok are all build on interruption.
The business rationale for this all make sense. As for why consumers eventually came around to dealing with interruptive ads, I’m not sure what happened other than capitulation. There are too many good shows on too many services to justify paying for ad free experiences everywhere.
So we’re all sucking it up again. Sometimes it’s brutal. But sometimes its isn’t that bad. I think we all (and by that, I mean me) over estimated our lack of tolerance for advertising. As much as I crap on the pretentions of our industry sometimes, they are pretty good at this sort of thing. After all, what’s better than the Progressive “Becoming your parents” ads, or Geico’s “Tag Team” spots. Keep em coming old school creatives!
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Besides interruption, here are the other big stories of 2022. Let me know what I’m missing
They broke Meta.
Apple’s ID rule changes absolutely rocked the industry, and sparked the end of the duopoly
Regulatory weirdness
Is there going to be some kind of privacy law? We’re still sure. But all year long, the would-be actions of regulators caused digital ad businesses to change how they operate, or at least act like they were. Then weird things happened, like Sephora getting fined and the FTC going after local data companies few had ever heard of. Where is this headed?
ID paralysis
There are so many efforts from big players aimed at coming up with an industry wide replacement for the cookie. Yet is any one of them making an impact in the market? It reminds me of the the old sports cliche - if you have two quarterbacks, you have none.
Cable TV as AOL dialup
While Warner Discovery CEO Zaz says he’s still a believer in linear TV, his company and others now run cable networks with essentially no original shows, or no programming at all. They are there to squeeze out re-trans fees until they die
Currency wars
This was the year that Nielsen took a pounding, and giant media companies like NBCU, Paramount and Disney touted different partnerships with multiple measurement upstarts. Meaning the TV ad market has absolutely no clarity at the moment.
Digital publishing meltdown
BuzzFeed’s stock is basically pocket change. Protocol shut down. So did Input. Vice is in trouble - again.
Retail media rules
This has been well chronicled, but the growth has been nothing short of astonishing
Apple is a high ambitious, highly disingenuous ad company
Just a $5 billion little project for Tim “Targeting” Cook, and TV advertising is his next frontier.
Everybody has a clean room
Yet so far, usage has been slow, per Insider.
Everybody is TikTok
Everyone from Pinterest to Facebook looked to ape TikTok’s algorithm and UI. Even Netflix was worried.
Happy New Year! See you at CES. And if you need content strategy or thought leadership help this coming year, get in touch at mike@shieldstrategic.com