TV's currency debate increasingly feels like a distraction
The industry is focused on counting viewers, when attribution is where the focus needs to be
Joanna O'Connell scoffed.
The digital veteran, and longtime Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, was moderating a panel at Open AP’s Advanced Advertising Summit during the recently concluded Cannes advertising festival. O'Connell’s task was to help a group of ad buyers sort through the ever-raging debate over the future of measurement and currency in the TV advertising business.
Ever the digital native, O'Connell pressed the group on why this discussion is so crucial. In digital advertising, O'Connell explained, brands do buy and sell media using currency - you have to put something on an invoice - but they don’t really get hung up on what that currency is. Because for the most part, they are gauging whether their campaigns worked, while calculating their own ROI.
It doesn’t matter so much what units they agree to transact on - it matters whether the campaign did what it was supposed to. O'Connell didn’t exactly put it this way verbally, but her face said, “Currency?! Who cares?”
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Based on the number of announcements, panels, press accounts and RFPs, everybody in the TV business seems particularly fixated on this currency question. Every TV media company is out touting new partnerships and tests with alternative currencies, and of course a slew of startups are raising tens of millions, pushing their better mousetraps and duking it out regularly on panels - including one that got slightly heated during OpenAP’s event.
Everybody has a hot take on this, except maybe the ones that matter the most - the brands.
On the latest episode of my Next in Marketing podcast, I spoke with Luke Kigel, vp, Walgreens Media & Head of Walgreens Advertising Group about how his company views the TV upfronts in general, and the future of currency. If I were to sum up his viewpoint, it would be ‘reluctant participant.’ (those are my words).
Regarding the upfront: “It’s still very much how the industry operates and how the industry organizes,” he said. “It’s very antithetical to how people live their lives and consume media.”
Regarding the currency conversation, Kigel struck a similar resigned-for-now tone.
“ We need to modernize how television is bought and sold,” he said. “Everything should be based on this outcomes based mentality.”
Yes, part of that shift requires a better way of counting impressions - but that’s not the end goal. “We’re so focused on getting multitouch attributions further advanced to allow for all media.”
Yes, attribution is talked about in TV circles - but it’s not nearly the focus right now, as incumbents battle over whether to use panels, ACR data, or some combination of both, and how to calculate reach using six different devices graphs no one understands. I’m starting to wonder if this battle is something of a sideshow.
For starters, it feels good for the big TV players to kick Nielsen when they're down, even as they re-up their deals with the research incumbent. Inking deals with all the new upstarts makes everyone in TV land look as though they are making progress towards becoming more like Facebook and Google.
The thing is, as the IAB CEO David Cohen told me recently, “We tend to over index for the top few hundred brands.” That is, the old school TV advertisers. But the Walgreens of the world increasingly don’t care about this stuff.
Maybe Walgreens is an extreme example, as the company has also become a fast-growing ad seller. The more you get hooked on transforming your business- and making money from being - as he put it '"digitally led, technology enabled and data fueled” - the more you want to see this reflected in all your media spending. Especially the most expensive medium.
Is TV getting there any time soon? Or is this currency uproar a big distraction, when attribution is the real challenge TV needs to tackle?
For now, TV titans like NBCU have a great counter argument, that might be summed up like this “We just pulled in a billion in the upfront. So thanks for your advice Mike, but things seem to be going pretty great.” That’s very fair. Maybe the biggest TV brands, the Geicos and McDonaldses, will never obsess over attribution like digital natives.
The thing is, there are a lot more of these digital-first brands, led by digitally-born execs, coming down the pike. I recently spoke to Meg Ciarallo VP of Brand and Consumer Marketing at the eCommerce startup Bolt for an upcoming podcast, and SPOILER ALERT, she’s not spending much time worrying over GRPs. Her company cares about dynamic attribution
“It’s not how we buy,” she said. “I think what it is interesting is that [GRPs, etc.] are a proxy metric. We don’t need to deal with proxy metrics anymore.”
“It’s really important to have real time data that is actually from the real metrics your business is driving.”
Real data, real metrics, real business - seems like it matters a lot more than currency to marketers.
I don’t buy into this notion that “Everything should be based on this outcomes based mentality,” and that attribution is the key to doing that. Attribution windows are set at what? 30 days? 14? 7? It’s completely a recipe for a short-termism and completely ignores the long-term brand building impact of television. Meanwhile, you ask where the brands are? marketers are turning more and more to branding as their primary focus. Focusing on short-term attribution to drive tv buying decisions doesn’t add up for most.
I view measurement as an iceberg (one that's not melting). What I mean by this is that above the water are 'currency' metrics that allow the buyers and sellers to have a common understanding for basic data that they agree to pay/be paid on. Under the water line are a far greater set of metrics focused on attribution. These may be vertical specific, proxies that provide directional value or definitive sales metrics. The more known and deterministic the attribution measure is, the less the currency measure may matter.