Redefining a market

Do consumers really see all video, online and offline, as one as we say in the industry? I suspect not. On the contrary, I think they draw a clear distinction - For e.g., " I don't watch TV anymore, I have Netflix!" and so on...

However,the convergence from the business point of view is very clear. In a nutshell, TV is moving towards the data-driven targeting and automation aspects of digital and digital video is trying to be, well, TV-like on several things from content type to positioning in the advertisers' / ad buyers' mind.

Trying to be 'TV-Like' seems to be the more dominant pattern of the two right now.

Consider some of the recent news from the US : Google's OTT play on Cable & Satellite TV with You Tube TV (and thereby on to the Addressable TV space through distributor ad slots) and re-entry into Programmatic TV for linear inventory via DBM; Plans from Facebook, Twitter,Snap, Amazon et al to get into TV-type shows and the focus on premium content in general ; the related conversation about the living room TV set as a screen for digital video; the very existence of something like the NewFronts that, unlike the TV Upfronts ,is a marketing rather than a transactional exercise. Etc.

Why should this be when the market is clearly going in favour of digital ? For example, digital ad spend is expected to equal and, according to some sources, even exceed TV this year in the US.

And therein lies the flaw (in this video-value context ) in comparing those two.

Unlike TV, 'digital' isn't one entity. Specifically, Search is a separate format for a separate objective and a different market that exists pretty much independently.It has very little significant influence on most (read non-Google) of the digital market. Stripping it out reflects the real battleground on which all of those players find themselves, i.e. the market is smaller and TV's share larger. (Ref. chart below)

Arguably there are only two ad markets : branding and search/performance. TV dominates the first , Google the second. Media and channels may and do have elements of both - e.g. Social - but the fundamental drivers remain those two. This is a redefining of the market that the players themselves , either consciously or otherwise, have already worked out but something that the rest of us tend to miss out on from the headlines.

Now add to the above the TV subscription market and you have a big value bucket to draw from (as the likes of You Tube TV, Sling, Hulu, Netflix and the like are already) - but that is a separate story on which more later.

Thanks for reading. Cheers

Two Elephants in the Ad Measurement Room

The first elephant is the difference between digital consumption and digital advertisingconsumption. All the usual issues of viewability, bot fraud and, well, plain unnoticeabilty - and I'm looking squarely at you here, little banner ads ! - is why the percentage of ad exposures will remain relatively stable even as online consumption grows exponentially.(Though,obviously, the absolutes of ad exposures will grow with it)

The good thing with online video advertising where the difference is clearly quantified as the difference between ad impressions and ad views is that the elephant is easily sighted, understood and can be responded to.

The second elephant in the room is the less obvious one : TV ad avoidance.

There is simply no way of knowing whether people really watched your ads on TV. All that commercial ad break ratings tell us for certain - and this is keeping aside markets such as ours in MENA where these are not even available in the first place ! - is that people didn't switch off the TV and didn't zap channels.

Whether they walked out of the room or switched their mind off or buried their noses in their phones or , indeed, watched the TV commercials with love and adoration during those three or five or ten long minutes we do not know. And have no way of knowing.

So in effect we are penalizing online video for being transparent while not holding up TV to the same level of scrutiny and accountability. So TV ad exposures* all over the world are likely to be overstated simply because of a quantification gap (see figure)

* This post is only from the limited point of view of ad exposure. Engagement, impact, sales outcome et al are a different- though surely correlated !- matter.

While realistically speaking this gap can't be eliminated, can it be reduced ? Perhaps through syndicated sample survey-based research or,say, through more pervasive individual advertiser-level A/B experiments ? Hard to tell - but as viewer consumption boundaries blur and the market battles intensify, more attention will probably need to be paid to this TV elephant to size it up to some reasonable approximation.

(click to enlarge picture)