TV Learns to Live With the Duopoly (Or the New One At Least)
Tech giants, retail media companies could be they key to unlocking the long tail of advertising
This post is part of a special multi-part series sponsored by Walmart Connect.
Even as the TV ad industry has become more driven by data and technology, executives in the business have long held onto a few key tenets:
Let’s not let TV end up like the open web (i.e., cheap prices, endless inventory)
Let’s not let the tech giants take over our industry just like the web
But as the pressure mounts to not only hold onto the big TV pool of ad revenue but ideally grow the pie, the TV business is giving up on its religion - quickly. Consider that:
Amazon and Roku - blood rivals in the TV operating system wars - are suddenly partners
Even more eye-opening - just as Disney has tried to become a walled garden of its own, it’s now partnering with Amazon (the same company that is trying to kill it in streaming
Which makes me wonder - could the big TV and streaming companies ape the duopoly playbook (millions of long tail advertisers) by just giving in and letting the duopoly/triopoly players in the door.
Alas, we’ve been talking about how TV advertising may become a much bigger and broader business a lot lately, and whether that will be driven by the networks themselves, consortiums such as Universal Ads, or upstarts like MNTN.
That effort right now seems to be a mess. But as one executive pointed out to me recently, there’s a much easier way for TV to become home to thousands, if not millions of new advertisers
'Turn to the guys who already do that. For instance:
Amazon’s growth in retail media could easily bring a surge of new brands to TV. Besides the Disney deal, the company’s DSP has become far more prominent as CTV surges. Now the company has ID (thanks to Roku) as well as a growing stable of Gen AI and AI buying tools that help these brands get off the ground
Google is looming. Even as the company faces an ad tech breakup, YouTube is already a huge TV ad seller. Why couldn’t its data, DSP, and long tail of advertisers be applied to lots more TV advertising.
Meta is nowhere in TV, but it clearly has designs on all of the advertising business
"TV sellers are being less religious about their demand,” said one TV tech insider. “So why wouldn't Amazon and Google be a way that more small to mid-sized brands come to TV. They have the demand. You may be 'helping a competitor' but you are still taking a bigger cut than sharing with an ad tech vendor."
Plus, who better to bring more accountability and shopping capabilities to TV than the experts?
The wild card to me is Walmart. The company’s ad ambitions are growing rapidly, and Walmart Connect is built upon The Trade Desk’s tech. TTD is trying to become an essential player in CTV through both its buying platform and nascent operating system.
Not to mention that Walmart now owns video, and all home screen ad inventory and data that comes with it.
Could Walmart bring a whole bunch of new advertisers to TV?
“Absolutely,” Ryan Mayward, SVP, retail media sales at Walmart Connect told me at Cannes in the latest episode of Next in Media.
Walmart is not only looking to push more non-TV brands to TV via Vizio, it wants to bring more shopping attribution to CTV overall.
“Walmart Connect started with the largest brands in the world, and we’ve since built out a very large business working with small to medium-sized brands and third-party sellers,” he said. “The big barrier to entry, or one of them in the TV realm [for these kinds of brands has been TV creative]. We also have an opportunity to just solve that on their behalf through AI-enabled creative tools,” he said.
Ironically, despite all the attention around new entrants trying to make TV advertising accessible, it might just be the giants - or new giants- who drive the ecosystem bigger.
Which traditional media companies may just need to live with.
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