Agencies & Consulting

“Paying more for better is genuinely suspicious,” Val Morgan Managing Director Guy Burbidge told the Future of TV Advertising forum in one of a handful of central themes that emerged from this year’s event. “We may be the only industry in the world ... that values the wrong proxies as a proxy for success."  The frustration from Burbidge and many of his peers across media is that for all the industry talk of better attention, effectiveness and business metrics, those measures are perpetually ambushed by default market behaviour to “squeeze” the cost of CPMs and blunt audience reach over the cost of impact. "We're truly at a crossroads. That crossroad is effectiveness versus efficiency. For the last four years … we feel like we're talking about the same things over and over again.”

Media owners would not shy away from investing in a cross-market platform that provides scale and ease of buying if they were assured that buyers would lean in and support it, says News Corp's Pippa Leary. The alternative is risk watching premium video – BVOD, AVOD and CTV – go the way of programmatic display, a type of show that nobody wants to watch again.

IPG Mediabrands boss Mark Coad made fast headlines last week, dismissing reports on the prevalence of principal media trading – i.e. media arbitrage – as wildly exaggerated in Australia. There was more to the panel conversation than the phantom existence of holding company financial instruments in media trading, covered in this piece, but to round out the alleged market myth of principal trading – also termed "capital programs" partly to avoid the market whiff circling principal media contracts – here's a more complete wrap of the entire on-stage panel conversation between two global media agency juggernauts and a feisty indie.

An early snapshot of an Australian version of ThinkBox’s deep dive into short-term and long-term ROI via GroupM investment data shows it broadly aligns with the UK study: TV’s ROI in both the short-term and long-term is holding, while price inflation in other channels like social video is reducing its returns. But, while stressing the final report could change, Thinkbox head of research Anthony Jones said its modelling “seems to be suggesting there's more money going into out-of-home in this market than profitability is suggesting it should”.

Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz last year created a disturbance in the metrics for decades underpinning the media business. Planning media campaigns on blunt audience reach numbers alone, per his analysis of 1,000 campaigns via Wavemaker and Kantar, delivers "really mediocre outcomes". As the TV industry aligns on a plan to build a real-time outcomes platform to help stem the flow of dollars to three big walled gardens, Thomaz has reservations about trying to compare TV on performance marketing metrics. “That worries me ... We know from decades of existing research that the long-term impact of advertising is twice the short-term impact of advertising," he says. But that doesn’t mean industry shouldn’t build it. "It's definitely the right path, and we can do this," per Thomaz, "but we cannot stop there." More broadly – i.e. across all channels – he thinks agencies are best placed to crack the ads-to-outcomes code. He and colleagues have literally written that code – and Thomaz urges them to "steal it and run."

Move fast and break things has been the tech sector's motto for two decades – this week TV networks, streamers and media agencies agreed to move fast and build a big thing that would help industry move from reach-based measurement systems into one that maps outcomes in real-time, like Google and Meta already do with their dashboards. Adgile Media reckons it can have one live in 12 months – and was backed to build it by both Nine TV sales boss Nikki Rooke and Video Futures Collective lead and Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain at the Future of TV Advertising conference.

Nine, News Corp and Seven were broadly aligned on the need to retreat and cut supply of premium video inventory from leading online advertising exchanges and demand side platforms (DSPs) to avoid repeating what adtech cowboys did to publishers producing professional content in the online display ad market more than a decade ago.  There's talk of resurrecting the walled garden for BVOD inventory that was "watered down" to become Voz Streaming – but this time with streamers welcome to join. Agencies are less keen.

We're all being asked to do more with less. It's time to stop trying, says Atomic 212 Chief Digital Officer James Dixon, and focus only on what actually matters; solely on getting the right things done. That applies squarely to metrics – and marketing return on investment, or MROI, is the chief marketer's most powerful tool. With measurement, outcomes and market mix models high on the agenda at this week's Future of TV Advertising event, it's an insight that could hardly be more timely.

After 18 months of industry fracturing and division, OzTam is laying down a statement of intent to bring everything together – and create a currency that moves beyond the broadcaster system. You could call it total TV measurement. CEO Karen Halligan has launched a proof-of-concept and aims to be live with a currency that measures linear broadcast, BVOD, streaming, and FAST by early 2027. She also has an announcement or two up her sleeve, though for now remains tight-lipped on speculation a major platform may be poised to plug into Voz Streaming.

Omnicom Media Group Chief Operating Officer Kristiaan Kroon suggests agencies crying for collaboration between TV networks and video streamers have missed the point. Maybe the buy-side should just get on with its job, concentrate on getting its own house in order, and let competition do the rest.