I believe his one line was "Sock it to me...?" Little did he know he was prophesizing.

David, eight years later Nixn was on NBCs mega  hit, "Laugh In" to hype his campaign for POTUS.

As with all tv programming the prime factor is the eternal search for ratings, so if politician guests can generate them, so be it. And this is nothign new: (sadly) I am old enough to remember watching JFK and Nixon, in 1960, appearing separately to hopefully get double the ratings bang, on the The Tonight Show with Jack Parr. (Hugh Downs was the announcer; Jose Melis led the band.)

Thanks Charlie! I do believe that listening to books is valuable and nourishing, it is not reading. The brain works very differently, and the person's attention while listening is freqnely shared with anther activity, driving for example, which can have a signciant impact on the depth of engagement with the writing.

Thanks for this Dave, great piece. While many of my friends feel differently about the listening vs. reading issue, for me nothing replaces the written word traveling through my eyes to my brain. And one of the most rewarding thing about being a grandparent is seeing my grandkids being voracious readers.

@Joe, I read through the report and I believe the ANA is trying to do too much here.  While it recognizes that influencer marketing varies wildly in the approach and offerings, the only thing I really agree with is that brands, agencies, whoever, is engaging the influencer's agency/rep should agree on KPIs and then decide if the total investment is worth it.  For more than a decade, we always established KPIs and "what does success look like" when negotiating campaigns on behalf of brands that engaged the influencers that we represented. 

When it comes to media and certain metrics, it's going to vary wildly by platform and the vast majority of influencers don't know how to collect and present that data - so it's added work for me to access that data and then present it in a format that most agencies and brands can work with.

There is no "standard" contract for traditional talent and music representation because the terms are almost always dictated by the stature of the talent and the specific services the agent provides. Set benchmarks and KPIs during the negotiation and agree on deliverables. Anything beyond that really isn't anyone's business as to how the talent is compensated.  

Josh, I'm much more hopeful than Stephanie. We look for reading when we hire and I have been pleasantly surprised about how many voracious readers we are hiring straight out of college. Our experience may not be indicative of all young people, but we have to all keep pushing.

@Dan C. from MS Entertainment: Re. purpose, you can read the report by clicking on the link, but here's what it says: "to identify areas
of waste in influencer marketing and then remedies to reduce that waste and optimize
spending. That working group has covered areas including selecting influencers, vetting
influencers, models for influencer management, governance/compliance, and measurement. Influencer marketing agency compensation emerged as a significant and ongoing
challenge for marketers and an opportunity for additional learning, given widespread
concerns around transparency, consistency, and alignment to performance."

Re. your second question, I believe many marketers have been striving to understand the net agencies take on their gross spending for a variety of reasons, including negotiating better terms, in-housing, etc., but mainly just to understand the relative ROI of their "working" vs. "non-working" media budgets.

Re. your point about non-disclosure, based on my coverage of the business, I don't think that's necessarily true, especially between big advertisers (the kind that are ANA members) and agencies, but if you read the report you'll see there's not 100% unanimity even about that.

What exactly is the purpose of this study? What is the transparency they're Presenting?   Why does an agency need to disclose its operating agreement with influencers?  Brand agencies do not need to disclose how much they charge their brand clients for campaigns, so why does an influencer agency need to be held to a different standard? 
Managing influencers is not a one size fits all engagement and not all influencers are equal on many levels. 

I also think that Podcasts is the new talk show will be in syndcation not just local podcasts I think NBCU, CBS Media Ventures, Debmar-Mercury etc. Maybe just 30 minutes or can be used in a 60 minute format with a first half & a 2ND have at a later time or combined in my opinion. That is where the talk show format is going in a podcast setting. 

Walker:  Huge thanks for the references and forthright insights on LLMs, AI plus your cautions on their use in marketing.  Garbage in, garbage out!?  Appears to have parallels to the current often deliberate disconnect and misunderstanding of the relative value of device/screen-based versus persons-based (consumer) actual exposure media measurement and the latter's imperative to drive a campaign outcome verus the former.

My former colleague Stephanie Doennecke at VideoAmp: "The only way kids today would read a book is if it was a TikTok challenge."

I don't believe the cancel button is the new protest sign Spotify, Dinsey+/HULU still make billions of dollars for many that do cancel which doesn't really work in my opinion. Which is just fantasy as I read an article last about this very thing which if you boycotted everything you would not have anything. Boycotting isn't my thing and it's hard to prove that a boycott works as businesses don't report on boycotts in earning reports and as I say still makes billions of dollars even those that do boycott said company.

Even if I was into boycotting I wouldn't be bragging about it on social media. More power to the few that walk the walk than just talk as most just talk and don't do anything. I don't care that will say I have no principle or morals if I had Disney+ or HULU I wouldn't cancel because of Jimmy Kimmel has to be many things than just an issue for me to boycott.  

Nothing excites me more than to have an ad be put over what I was watching or looking at.

TG for human approval!

Yes, the Ars AI making up quotes and editors not catching it prior to publication is a serious issue. Even more incredulous is the subject of their story. AI spiteful AI researched, composed, and published a "hit piece" on the open internet in order to shame an open source moderator who had rejected the AI's code commit.

We live in interesting times.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

Every year polls say trust in media is low and that isn't going to change anytime soon in my opinion. Local TV News is the most trusted out of any other news source.

Hmmm ... I hadn't heard that recently.

Cahillane should be respected for having the courage to challenge conventional wisdom. With an increasoing proportion of consumers facing hard choices in balancing their cost of living, brand marketing is likely to have much lower impact than cost and value considerations. Wish him luck. 

Wow, Maarten, this sounds scary. But, I think that the ad agency business will, somehow, survive as it reboots to deal with changing conditions--as it has in the past. You often refer to the "billable hour" model, which I guess exists in Europe but was long ago abandoned in the U.S.Yes, U.S.agencies try to keep track of how their employees spend their time but they can't just charge as many hours per client as they wish. The total amount a client pays is agreed to and tightly controlled by both the client and the agency. 

As for the agencies facing doom, consolidation being a sign of this ---along with "principal buying" to earn added fees--- why is conslidation for advertisers and the media OK, but not for the agencies?It's a natural consequence of too many players and a revenue base that is no longer growing fast enough to support all of them.

Will the agencies be forced to guarantee "outcomes"? That gambit has ben offered many times before --by small shops, desperate for some business. But it doesn't work for most agencies--unless the client is willing to guarantee its agency "partner" a certain profit, in return. And few will sign on to that.

As for myself, I think I'll keep my Omnicom stock a little longer.

Also important to note that "Perception of Bias: A related part of the analysis found that 58% of Americans believe most journalists are biased."

I imagine if they perceive bias, that's going to affect trust.  And others (both sides) felt there is too much selective reporting.

Jack, I agree that allocating budgets across 209 DMAs and then negotiating, trafficking, posting and measuring it as a national campaign was virtually impossible even a few years ago, as much because of social engineering issues, not just mismatched systems, lack of automation, lack of standards, etc. However, today, the corporate and organizational resistance is melting and systems built in the data-driven linear world for national can be adapted to incorporate local broadcast pretty efficiently. Many of us have been doing it in some ways for some time, particularly relative to the diginets, which have been pretty agressive about being included in national programs. Finally, pricing flexibility and better management of preemption issues at local stations is also opening up.
Thus, I agree with Ed that integrating the local broadcast spots into national programs is not only essential for competition with the digital players, but is essential for upping TVs game in maximizing value for advertisers. Not only can hybridizing the campaigns now be done, it must be done.

Jack, it all depends on the situation a brand finds itself in. For many national brands precision geotargeting may be overkill or they rely on local store advertising to carry the ball regionally. For others, which target very afflujent consumers or certain ethnic groups, local GRP weighting laid in on top of national umbrella media buys can make sense.

As for execution, you need certain data. First, a pretty good indication of sales potential in each area. Second, an indicadion of how your national buys generate GRPs in each area. Third, you need cost per rating point data for each area for the kinds of TV you would use locally.

Given that info--which you would need anyway--even if you went to You Tube or Meta--it's a faiurly simple computer exercise--quite routine, I might add for those advertisers who do this not in all markets but in markets they consider key areas.  The computer figures out what the GRPs will be in each area for the national buy. Then it tries to add local GRPs--as cost efficiently  as possible--in those markets that are underdelivering media weight relative to the desired amount. Then, the buys are made locally, to the  reqired add-on GRP levels. As for markets where the national buys, themselves, overdeliver, there's little you can do about that.