Commentary
Convergent Audience Buys Projected To Supplant Conventional TV Buys
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, November 6, 2013
The burgeoning audience-based TV/video ad marketplace has a name and some scope now thanks to a marketplace analysis conducted by long-time media industry economist, researcher, consultant and publisher Jack Myers. The analysis, which was passed on to me by Simulmedia Founder Dave Morgan uses a simple name to describe the marketplace, “convergence,” and Myers predicts while audience-buying is a relatively tiny sliver of the $75 billion spent on TV and digital video advertising, it will grow rapidly, especially the programmatic elements of it.
Within three years, Myers predicts audience-based convergence buys will be growth to more than $30 billion, and by the end of the decade will be the vast majority of all buys made in what will then be a $116 billion convergence marketplace.
Not surprisingly, Myers believes programmatic’s share of the convergence market will also begin to scale rapidly, growing from almost nothing today to billions of dollars by 2016, to the majority of all buys made by 2020.
This is where Morgan’s Simulmedia becomes an interesting part of the story. During the meeting, he showed me some new methods Simulmedia is developing for targeting and buying TV, and ultimately video, audiences by leveraging the power of both first- and third-party data, including the data linking actual product sales from a single-source TV audience database (TiVo’s TRA) to new audience segmentation clusters in Simulmedia’s audience-targeting system. In other words, you’ll be able to use it to target and buy TV advertising to reach consumers of a product, or even a competitor’s brand.
Simulmedia isn’t the only company using smart data to redefine TV audience-buying. Jon Mandel’s PrecisionMedia and VisibleWorld’s AudienceXpress are developing similar segmentations. By unlocking the value of previously opaque audience segments, all of these efforts should contribute to the kind of growth Myers is projecting for the marketplace.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what's in this for an advertiser. What you've described here is a technology-driven, ADD-addled marketplace where no brand message can possibly scale, let alone engage. Just wait until Twitter adds another billion fleeting impressions per day into the mix -- with investors to please, no less! CTRs will continue to decline in a race to the bottom that leaves all but a few web publishers in the dust, courtesy of the generation my namesake warned us of 60 years ago.
@Mike Einstein, re. What's in it for advertisers: better audience targeting.
Better audience targeting for what, Joe, ads (traditional, naked, branded or otherwise) the audience wants absolutely nothing to do with? Sounds idiotic to me.
Mike, more target reach + less waste = more sales for less spend for advertisers. Over time - hopefully - it will mean fewer, more relevant ads for audiences.
Dave, I understand the theory, trust me. I also understand it's a purely defensive reaction, and rightly so. But to your comment points: the kind of online CPMs I read about, and the RPM page-views of the big three: Google, Yahoo/Bing, and Facebook, reveal a media ecosystem (at least on the digital side) that believes itself worthless as a branding medium, with performance metrics (avg CTRs at statistical zero) that bear this out. We've been targeted to death; targeted to the point where Facebook can tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the 1-in-2000 highly targeted users who responds to an ad. Problem is, the other 1999 exhibit no measurable interest whatsoever. But it's not all bad news, because on-average that single click-through only costs eighty cents, which means the other 1999 are virtually free (assuming there's not fraud involved). Unfortunately, they're also utterly worthless (unless you think their prorated individual cost of .04 cents proclaims any real value). And this isn't just my opinion. It's the expressed and demonstrated opinion of anyone who buys and sells illusive "impressions" at forty cents per thousand and associated click-throughs at eight hundred dollars per thousand. So, maybe I'm confused, but where exactly do these forty cent online CPMs converge with TV's $50 CPMs for the exact same people? And are we talking about program viewing or commercial viewing? Like I said, it sounds idiotic to me. Speaking of which, if only 1-in-2000 on-average presently respond to a Facebook ad, and Facebook reputes itself to be on the cutting edge of targeting technologies, how in the world can you conclude that advertising could possibly have any relevance to anyone? How can anyone (that 1-in-2000 respondent notwithstanding) have a preference for something they not only don't want, but are willing to pay extra to avoid on TV? Don't those 1999 out of 2000 no shows on Facebook tell you anything about relevance? Good luck with this convergence bit.
Mike, I am totally with you about the problems of ad spam, caused by taking DR sensibilities to media. I truly believe that better data in TV will ultimately result in more filtering of ads, primarily because consumers will demand it. TV ads will become more and more skippable. If ads aren't made better and more relevant for viewers, they will be skipped - viewers will tune away. This data will drive networks to lower ad loads and cut out the redundant, irrelevant ads that drive them away.
This is a fantastic dialog that rarely happens. Thanks to Joe, Dave, and Mike for making value arguments instead of just hype.
Dave, there is no consumer demand for ads, relevant or otherwise, and never has been. Further, increased data in the hands of agencies and advertisers will only increase the number of ads no one wants to see -- at least if the entire history of commercial media is any indication. Besides, the prospect of fewer, more relevant ads hardly explains the ascent of programmatic ad exchanges designed to traffic billions of daily impressions. Consumers don't want relevant ads any more than they want irrelevant ads, and like all marketing metrics, those used to describe the efficacy of relevant advertising and big data rarely if ever describe what actually works. Rather, they describe what can be sold to hapless advertisers. That's why behavioral targeting was refashioned as predictive analytics and why marketers are so keen to dump the CTR: pretty hard to sell statistical zero.
Um, I'm just a chronicler, not a practitioner, so pardon me for piping in here, but I think there is a lot of data, evidence and actual human behavior to dispute the claim that there is no demand for ads. Part of that is semantic (how do you define an ad). If you define it in the narrow sense, like a TV commercial, people absolutely engage with, even talk about, share, discuss at water coolers, social media, etc., their favorite ads. Yes, it's not universal engagement, and it's not as high as most of the media content the ads are adjacent too, but there are even examples when that happens (ie. Super Bowl). But defined more broadly as brand messages and information, there is absolutely consumer demand for that. A good example is search (people actually seek out information about brands, products, etc.). I could go on, but making a unilateral statement about something and assuming it is an empirical fact doesn't actually make it a fact. But let me throw one more into the hoopla. There is another indirect form of consumer demand for ads, which is ads have underwritten the value exchange consumers opt into to underwrite and pay for the exchange of other things they want -- especially ad-supported content. Will some, maybe most, avoid, skip, zap, whatever, those ads if given the technological control over them -- absolutely, but only when the ads aren't relevant to them. And that's a good thing, because why would an advertiser want to deliver irrelevant ads to consumers. That's what companies like Simulmedia, etc., are trying to fix -- getting the right ads in front of the right people. Is it a perfect science? No, probably will never be (given the complex nature of human beings), but it can get a lot better. Will brand messaging and targeting -- and related business models -- continue to evolve. Absolutely. Hopefully, in a direction that helps brands connect with consumers who do demand their messages -- whatever their motivations are for that.
Good fun, here. But, Joe, you're playing pretty fast and loose with the concept of demand. Sure we all have our favorite commercials, and we all succumb to them from time to time, but no one sits down in front of the TV demanding them. i.e. Have you ever heard anyone complain about the lack of ads on HBO? Of course not. You hear just the opposite. And it isn't necessarily the particulars of ad that we object to (although sometimes it is), it's the unwanted interruption in one form or another that, given a choice, most of us would opt to avoid. And the numbers show this. Simple logic should tell us therefore (at least it tells me) that a targeting methodology designed around something that no one wants and which everyone is equipped and inclined to avoid, makes little, if any sense.
Maybe we're using language differently. Here's what I mean by demand:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand) "In economics, demand is an economic principle that describes a consumer's desire, willingness and ability to pay a price for a specific good or service. Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by buyers. The quantity demanded is the amount of a product people are willing to buy at a certain price; the relationship between price and quantity demanded is known as the demand relationship.[1] (see also supply and demand). The term demand signifies the ability or the willingness to buy a particular commodity at a given point of time." I think it is the right definition, because advertising is part of an economic principle called marketing. And it is all premised on a value exchange (exchanging some for the consumer's attention/consideration/loyalty, etc.). Obviously, there are other definitions of demand.
To Jeff's point about metrics marketing, and with all due respect Joe, what you've described here is the media industry itself, a closed-shop in which the consumers (the customers, if you will) are ad buyers, not folks in the audience. So let me revise and qualify my earlier claim by saying: "Simple logic should tell us therefore (at least it tells me) that a targeting methodology designed around something that no one "outside our industry" wants and which everyone is equipped and inclined to avoid, makes little, if any sense.
Jeff, I really value your perspective, but disagree. When I used to be in the newspaper business and we asked people why they bought their Sunday paper, 5 of the top 10 reasons were ads - car ads, job ads, home ads, department store ads and click coupons. While it is an extreme example, watching ads on the Super Bowl has become a big part of the viewer experience.
Behavioral advertising didn't give way to predictive analytics. While it helped spawn analytics, behavioral advertising has grown enormously over the past five years. While I personally don't like all of the ways it is utilized, you can't argue that it doesn't work and add value to at least some of the ecosystem constituents.
I do believe that we in advertising can do better, and I applaud your commentary and efforts to help call attention to some of those areas. However, it is not fair to claim that ads don't offer any value to viewers and that they don't care. Evidence is to the contrary.
Dave, Vogue Magazine is another place people go for the ads, but there's a big difference between wanting and searching for information on your terms and being stalked, interrupted, and assaulted by some third-party agenda.
Thanks, Dave. The feeling is absolutely mutual. I never claimed that ads don't offer value to consumers. What I said is that there is no consumer demand for ads. We shouldn't confuse consumer tolerance for actual demand where there is none, and we don't need to conflate the two in order to justify a perfectly reasonable desire to improve performance. I would argue, however, that those who benefit the most from behavioral targeting and predictive analysis technologies -- so far, at least -- are those who sell behavioral targeting and predictive analysis technologies. Meanwhile, clutter and costs continue to increase across the media ecosystem while performance continues to decline -- irrespective of technology. And so it will remain as long as we continue to hitch our stars to a model predicated on a phantom demand for a work product no one outside our industry really wants and everyone is equipped to avoid.
Interesting discussion. If you asked people "what is your level of need for ads" then you would get very few people saying it was high and a lot saying it was nil. But this does not lean that there isn't sub-conscious or latent demand for them. If you asked "what is your level of need to make better and more informed purchase decisions" then you would get a very different picture. No-one wants to spend money in an uninformed way and potentially blow their dough. Ads serve either an expressed or non-expressed informational need. That is, there is not direct demand for ads, but they are a secondary vehicle to satisfy the demand for information. After all, there's been a LOT of product sold over the past 50 or so years that own their success to advertising - not bad for a vehicle that has zero demand!
Again, I take a very broad definition of "advertising" (as in any form of brand messaging, not just TV commercials, etc.). But sticking with that narrow definition, a few other things to consider: One is the so-called "halo effect." There's been lots of research showing that it is the politically correct response to say you don't want advertising, but there is plenty of research to show that behaviors contradict that. Among the most powerful I've seen recently are biometric data such as eye-tracking or even neuromarketing research that shows people's gaze and brain functions do focus on advertising. Another bit of research is anecdotal, but telling. When I joined MediaPost 10 years ago, we were in the field with a study with CBS on consumer behavior with DVRs. Every study up until then focused on the downside -- how people used DVRs to skip through ads -- so we asked whether they ever used DVRs to pause, rewind and even record ads. I don't have the numbers handy, but a significant percentage said they did -- something like close to 10%. And that was completely self-reported, so who knows what actual behavior would be (but arguably, it would be a lot higher). I think TiVo and others have some behavioral data on this. My main point isn't that most people avoid (or do not demand) most advertising. That is absolutely true. But the point is that a significant number of people actually do demand advertising -- of a variety of reasons -- when it is the right advertising for them at the right time. But let me turn the table on all the naysayers to this thesis and ask, the same question of "non-advertising content." Can't we really say the same thing? Most people do not demand most of he non-advertising content they're exposed to. I mean, all you have to do is look at prime-time TV ratings trends over the past two decades, and that's supposed to be the creme de la creme of "non-advertising content," right? Okay, so think about it another way, how many people demand our most vaunted programming? Take "Breaking Bad," "Walking Dead," etc. It's still only a small percentage of the total population. My point: People only demand media content when it is the content they personally demand. I can't explain all the reasons why they would demand advertising or non-advertising content, but I can tell you that they do -- and the proportions may not be as far apart as you might imagine. People demand things that capture their imagination and which they find relevant for one reason or another. Sometimes advertising does that. It's more likely advertising will do that when the ads they are exposed to are the ones that are actually relevant for them. Go figure.
True that ads online benefit from peripheral association to content -- that's what publisher rate cards are all about. Likewise true that no one demands most TV programming. After all, who -- with the possible exception of Scott Baio and his agent -- would demand "Charles in Charge"? Consumer demand for virtually any product or service is rarely organic and almost always manufactured. That said, it's likewise true that no one tunes in to "Top Chef" or any other TV program (with the possible exception of the Super Bowl) to watch the ads, just as no one goes to NYTimes.com to see the ads. To the extent it still occurs, exposure to both online and TV ads -- relevant or otherwise -- is largely incidental, a byproduct of the consumer experience. Yes, some ads capture our attention, but those encounters too are incidental at best, and what captures the attention of one viewer for whatever reason may fall entirely flat with another. Historically, our misplaced fascination with online (and now TV) ad relevancy has less to do with the efficacy of the idea and more to do with the digital-versus-television battle for media dollars dating back to the mid-90s, when impossibly young and arrogant digital evangelists wrongly and tragically assumed that advertisers would ultimately prefer hyper-targeted ads (the right ad for the right person) to effective, scalable brand reach and tried to force a square DR peg into a round branding hole -- largely because their tool-driven arrogance assumed it was possible in the first place and therefore desirable. Extraordinary efforts to target the audience are mostly expedience-based (and not at all mindful of human nature) and will only continue to drive down performance and drive up costs for the true customer: the advertiser. Contrary to the legions of digital marketers drunk on their own Kool-Aid, the secret to effective scalable brand reach has nothing to do with targeting the audience and everything to do with letting the audience target us instead. It's easier, cheaper, far more effective and ecologically sound, not to mention entirely and profoundly possible. All we need to do is turn a switch between our ears. I'm happy to sit down and explain it to anyone willing to slow down long enough to suspend digital disbelief for a few minutes and listen...
@Jeff: Interesting. No one has accused me of being in the Kool-Aid camp before. If anything, I've always been extremely skeptical, even critical, of the ad business -- especially the digital part -- in all the years of covered it. The part that's interested me most, is the science, logic and reason that has come from good researchers about the way media and advertising impacts and influences people. I find that fascinating. I've also seen how powerful culture and ingrained belief systems can also be. It's why I love covering media (not advertising, per se). That said, I stick by my argument that people demand all sorts of content -- whether it is "entertainment," "editorial," "journalism," "information," "reality," or whatever label you want to put on it, or whether it is "advertising," "brand content," "native," or whatever label comes on that end. People demand information for all sorts of reasons unique to those people and the information they consume. I know the politically correct answer is that people don't want advertising, but the real answer is they just don't want the advertising they don't want. Just like they don't want the non-advertising content they don't want. It might be a good time to read, or re-read, Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail," because it goes a long way toward explaining the diversity of demand that is actually out there. I can give you plenty of examples where people do demand, even seek out and share advertising -- and not just when it runs in the Super Bowl. But you'd have to agree with what my definition of advertising is. Sometimes it's search, sometimes it's a viral video, sometimes its a TV commercial. Sometimes people care so much about those ads that they record the on their DVRs, post them on their Facebook pages, tweet them, or forward them in emails to their friends and families. Or sometimes, they just hum their jingles or quote their catchphrases in a personal conversation. I'm not a cultural anthropologist, so I can't explain scientifically why people do that. I'm just a trade journalist, but I can tell you that I have observed people doing all of those things in my life.
Joe, I've always applauded your native skepticism, in no small measure because of my belief that skepticism is our first adult obligation. Yes, as consumers we seek and engage content of all sorts. And yes, some ads -- like some videos -- resonate better than others, are shared and go viral. However, to say that people don't want advertising is not just politically correct, but factually and statistically correct as well. When the average number of online ads that actually engage consumers for whatever reason falls to statistical zero it's time to call a spade a spade, Chris Anderson's tortured Long Tail notwithstanding. As consumers, we don't seek out ads. We shop. En route we may stumble across or otherwise encounter ads -- positioned somewhere along or within the Long Tail -- that contain information for a product or service we want. But we shouldn't conflate the two. Advertising speaks to prospects (not customers) and generates awareness. Shopping (including search) is a prospect-initiated response to brand awareness generated by advertising. And right now advertising performance continues to decline while associated costs continue to rise. Why? Because no one really wants the ads and because the ad industry mistakenly thinks -- for patently self-serving reasons -- that the lack of demand is somehow related to the relevancy of the work product. It's not.
How about one more for the road...The legacy media model's dynamic of supply and demand simply doesn't apply to digital, because whereas a television or radio network has a fixed number of ad avails, there is no such standing inventory online. Indeed, a page-view doesn't even exist until a conscious consumer content choice triggers its creation. Essentially, therefore, the online media supply of ad space is a direct and subordinate mirror reflection of the audience demand for content, period. Certainly that content can and often does take the form of information about a product or service, but that's what search is for and not what we're talking about when we say there is no consumer demand for the ads or their accompanying intrusion. There is nothing to debate here: Bigger, faster, more has wrecked the joint. Case in point: If I buy ads on Facebook (the market leader) for forty-cents per thousand, and I need to buy two thousand of them to generate a single measurable response, it would require 2 billion impressions (any reasonable person would conclude we're in big trouble when we even talk in numbers this large) to generate a million visitors to my website at a cost of $800,000. The cost per impression of 4 hundredths of one cent, ought to tell us something about that impression's true value and how much audience demand for it there could possibly be. We're twenty years into this now and the TV guys are getting the bulk of the big branding dollars at fifty-bucks per thousand in prime time while Facebook's getting forty cents for the same thousand people. Facebook either has really lousy salespeople, or a really lousy product, or both, but the numbers don't lie. And carving this pie with a sharper targeting knife may make the individual pieces look better, but any way you slice it, they still leave a bitter taste.
If you do the math on all the non-advertising content, it would be a statistical zero too. Putting The Long Tail aside, there has and continues to be more information available than their are people hours available to consume it. In 2003, the Internet was generating one petabyte of new content per year. Now it is generating one petabyte of new content every two days. Most of that content is NOT advertising. Even if you look at our most highly curated content -- TV -- there are now 500 hours of original programming on the network schedules. That's more programming than anyone has time to consume. So the issue is not statistical averages. It's what content people actually consume. That includes a mix of very big and very small content. And some of it includes advertising.
Joe, No one said there wasn't a glut of content. And you're right, a 3-rated television program, for example, also means that 97% of the audience was otherwise engaged (the fact is, probably 60% or more of that 3% were otherwise engaged with one or more second-screens). But when you start talking fractions of fractions, you play right into Facebook's hands. They have a virtually unlimited supply of ad space for which there is no measurable consumer demand. That's why they only charge 40 cents per thousand. Reminds me of the two elderly ladies having lunch in the Catskills: "The food isn't very good this year." "I agree. And such small portions."
I'm loving this - and fall between both camps. Yes the 'infinite supply' on line means that there is a 'print more money' mindset which is driving down the value. Scarcity has it's price to the advantage of the electronic broadcast media. Plus, their inventory is linear and time-based. You can't store up an unsold ad-break and sell it later. But to my way of thinking we're torturing some mathematics with some of the extrapolations. For example, yes a 3-rated TV programme means that 97% weren't engaged. The imputation is that therefore a 3 isn't that good after all. So let's draw an analogy to examine that. Let's say the average person spends two hours a week doing their grocery shop (on average). This is probably generous but if we included convenience shopping it is probably pretty much on the money. Given that you can grocery shop pretty much 24/7 anywhere, that means that there are 168 available grocery shopping hours in a week ... and we only spend around 2 of them grocery shopping. That is around 1.2% of the available time - less than half of the maligned 3-rating TV programme (as a rating is actually expressing the average audience of the average minute of a programme). So we need to be careful and not extrapolate or conclude that grocery shopping is some niche activity, as it is one of the ultimate expressions of consumer demand and probably (I have no data on it) one of the single biggest markets (if not the biggest) globally.
Popular history likes to paint revolutions as singular events: James Watt flips the switch on his steam engine and the Agricultural Age ends! The Industrial Revolution changes everything! In reality it began somewhere ~1760 and it took until ~1840 for some major effects to kick in. We are very, very early on in the Information Revolution. Already, machine learning has begun to change things radically from what we knew even 5 years ago. But certain mega-trends are clear: costs of production plummets, amount of content skyrockets, ability of marketing communication (note I did NOT say advertising) to improve targeting and context improves (note I did NOT say gets perfect) but consumers' attention remains stagnant. I can easily foresee a future in which today's advertising and today's media become far less relevant and are supplanted by "always-on" marketing which is less creative and is ignored 99% of the time -- but is powerful and persuasive in the 1% of cases in which consumers have an interest. These are early days. All we can say with confidence about the future is that it will be different than today, and also different than our most and least optimistic predictions.
Yes Tom, I can also see the cost-driven "batter them into submission" model could become en vogue. I also see that model sitting right next to the skeleton of the dead goose but with its golden egg long gone.
John, perhaps a more generous way to view it would be as marketing that pings the consumer 24/7 and consumers that ignore the ping until they're ready to buy. Arguably, we are already there in some sense. No doubt vacuum cleaner marketers have been pinging my wife and I for a decade to persuade us to buy a new model. But when we decided to buy recently, advertising and owned media were not a factor at all: better, unbiased information and reviews were available by simply searching for them. The biggest factor in our decision was the fact that Miele (we bought one in taxicab yellow) makes an amazing product. It seems everybody online who talks about it has had a great experience. Great products will be the core of future marketing. It has always been hard to rescue a poor product through outstanding advertising. In the future, it will probably be entirely impossible.
No argument that great products are at the core of great marketing. My only quibble is a personal one. I'm a Dyson fan and my wife and I just bought the DC39 pet version (no, not so that the dog could do the vacuuming, it has pet hair attachments). Why did we buy that? First we'd had a Dyson for around 10 years decided to upgrade and give our existing one (which still works perfectly well I might add) to the in-laws. Second was that we were at our Easter Show and there was a stall set up showcasing the new models. I was in Dyson heaven! The demonstrator on the stand then gave me a 15% off redemption card. Deal sealed and the new Dyson arrived at the door two days later. I think I vacuumed the house for about two days straight! The other interesting thing is that Dyson rarely if ever advertise here in Australia - the product is so good they don't have to. Cheers and enjoy the Miele. (The irony of the comparison of vacuum cleaners is that the one that sucks the most is the better product ... sorry, couldn't help myself with the Dad-joke.)
Having worked in digital advertising for nearly 15 years, I have often joked that at times, we seem to be selling what people actually loathe. I think we can all agree that having 1 in every thousand people clicking on a banner, can’t be the right metric. And as viewability and audience validation become more prevalent, this will put an even bigger strain on vendors (lower CPMs to compensate) and agencies (explaining to clients why performance is not going to be attainable). However the reality that Facebook can tell a brand with more certainty than a TV Network who saw the ad (dare I say a LOT more certainty and a lot more detail) shouldn’t be lost on any of us. The fact they make up a huge chunk of all online impressions shouldn’t necessarily detract from this fact.
And while maybe this sentiment is slightly different in television, consumers have been “trained” for years to accept this advertising. Digital compounded the mistake when in-stream video was first introduced by not including pre-roll. I have spoken to friends that say they are actually more likely to NOT buy a product if they see an “annoying video message” from that brand online. They know it is something they “have to” watch and whether the ads presence is actually helping that person consume that content for free is lost on them. There was a very interesting article in the NYT today that talked about how Netflix and Amazon streaming services don’t have advertising and how the younger of the author’s two children is less annoyed when she can’t fast-forward through ads, b/c she has seen less commercials in her life…that illustrates the same point that people are certainly not seeking ads out.
Having said all this, people still need products and services; and the choices for these products are literally endless. So whether or not people seek out advertising is clearly less relevant than the fact that it still has an impact on what people buy. It is up to the industry to determine what the proper digital benchmarks are (beyond click) and more importantly, how brands can better utilize the digital outlets to help tell their story to their prospects and drive them to action. Of course everyone working in Digital advertising is trying to get in line to speak with Broadcast buyers and to capture the bigger TV budgets, and I think overlooking the granularity of targeting available is a mistake.