The Media Business Still Loves Its Silos

Video-centric remains a fantasy, despite consumers showing how much the old definitions don't matter

First a few housekeeping things from me. I’ve been hosting the Next in Media (formerly Next in Marketing) podcast for roughly three years, and I’ve recently entered into a great partnership with Beet.TV to help bring the show to more people. I’ve had an awesome group of guests thus far, including this week’s featuring Instacart’s Ali Miller. I encourage you to check it out.

Second, are you going to Cannes this year? Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting has invited me to partner with him on what we hope will be a very cool event at the Kerv Cafe. When Brian first reached out to me about this, I didn’t remember him, but then he reminded me that we used to work together. Once he explained the idea, I was in:

• We’ll be putting out a daily Cannes email

• From June 19-21 at the Kerv Cafe we’ll be hosting a series of interesting conversations with leaders in our space, include a crop of sessions that Tuesday focused on video, CTV and the creator economy

• There will also be a cocktail party at a villa

• Hopefully, a publishing executive dinner (get in touch if you’re interested in sponsoring.)

If you’re interested in the event at the cafe, you can sign up here.

Now here’s a video, for no reason.

Now, the actual newsletter…

Ever since YouTube broke out in the mid 2000s, and web video became a real thing, nearly every media buying agency declared they are ‘video-centric.’

Meaning that regardless of the fact that often they maintain entirely different business units – sometimes whole companies – to buy digital ads and TV ads and even social video ads, agencies for nearly two decades have insisted that video is video. When then decide where to park dollars, the thinking goes, everything should be on the same level playing field, because consumers don’t make any distinctions.

Yet here we are in 2023, heading into an upfront where siloed ways of working, debates over processes and definitions, and territorial disputes appear alive and well - and may be holding the business back.

 “Still a huge problem,” said one industry veteran. “The power struggle is real and sometimes fueled by the sellers.”

Take this week’s Joint Industry Committee gathering in New York. The event, aimed at helping develop a set of standards for emerging currencies, seemed inherently designed to also make a statement by who was and wasn’t invited. While Nielsen made headlines for declining an invite, YouTube, TikTok, Snap and others weren’t part of the conversation.

Indeed, besides currencies and methodologies, the conversation surrounding the JIC these days is about what is and isn’t premium. Guess who decides? The sellers!

Otherwise, I’m still not clear why the JIC exists. NBCUniversal famously asked 50 different media companies to deliver them RFPs so they could evaluate Nielsen alternatives. What didn’t they figure out during that process that a new committee will help them with? And if the JIC is designed to help establish standards for measurement methodology and transparency – won’t that lead all these new players toward doing things the same way?

Plus, pretty much every media company is already testing and transacting using new currencies -  so are they going to throw those tests out once the JIC makes its new rules?

One buyer I spoke to championed the JIC’s existence, in part arguing that NBCU’s work can’t really be applied well to the rest of the industry. Plus, it’s too challenging in this person’s view to have every agency and brand go its own way in terms or evaluating how Samba’s tech works versus VideoAmp’s. And waiting for the MRC is going to take too long, this person said.

Fair enough. But to me, the committee felt like a club designed to stave off the challenges of the growing digital threat. Sure, some of this JIC talk may be just Grade A salesmanship - arguing that only TV produces ‘real TV.’ Ok. So where were Netflix, and Amazon?

Getting back to the point about our silo problem – it says a lot that the business still has very distinct sales lanes - i.e. upfronts and Newfronts.  However other folks I talk to say the problem lies on the buy side. For example, while there is an overall industry-wide push toward executing TV buys using programmatic channels - enriching it with data along the way - those ‘legacy buyers’ are a problem, some (probably somewhat biased) people contend.

These old school TV buyers either don’t get DSPs, don’t want to, or just want to protect their territory. So they push their clients away from making smart decisions or asking the right questions in the name of maintaining their own relevance. Or they don’t ask the right questions about data and risk getting duped. I mean, do these guys even know what an IP address is, and that they may go away entirely?

As one media exec explained,  “there are agencies very much leaning into audience buying and some that are resistant, mostly because the senior leadership has been there a long time and is more comfortable with Nielsen GRPs.”

Some contend that these veteran buyers often insist on doing direct deals with the Peacock’s and Tubi’s of the world, even if those cost more than through programmatic channels.

Of course, these so called ‘legacy’ (ouch) buyers would tell a VERY different story. For instance, they laugh at the idea that digital buyers are ok with paying the same rate for video impressions, regardless of how long an ad is (30 seconds, 15? 6?), or the idea that YouTube says that it’s fine to use a metric designed to measure whether a banner showed up in a viewable portion of a web page to track premium TV. They scoff at running buys through a DSP that takes a huge cut for doing very little.

To be sure, the clients don’t always help matters. “I think we still in this industry spend a lot of time on reach,” said Mike Bregman, Chief Data Officer, Havas Media on stage at Thursday’s JIC event. “Clients ask ‘what's the cost per point ? What's the percentage of age demo we're getting?” We have to not throw [these concepts] in the garbage, but push it to the side a little bit.”

It’s not easy to push brand marketers toward programmatic when some are still living in a Must See TV era. “I think clients have to shift very quickly to thinking about customer journeys, not just on TV but CTV and streaming,” said Bregman. “It's very data rich, but isolated and fragmented.”

Yet even if many TV buyers and sellers agree that such fragmentation is a persistent issue, they don’t always agree on the resulting problems. For example, some would complain that too much money is actually being shifted from linear to CTV because of the over-influence of digital buyers and agencies.

To be sure, CTV is also the only good growth story that some of these cable and linear dependent companies have right now. So they are naturally leaned in, and of course can ultimately tell whatever story they want. As one CTV exec put – while digital advertising has long dealt with the duopoly, TV isn’t all that different. “There are only eight to 12 companies that really matter.” I guess it depends on who’s doing the counting.