Marketing

Amid warnings that measuring TV outcomes in real time could backfire because it cannot capture the totality of TV’s long-term effects, Adgile’s Stu Carr says it doesn’t have to. That’s because its purpose is to stop budget leakage to platforms that promise speed over substance. It doesn’t replace market mix modelling, nor audience measurement from OzTam or Kantar or digital platform or agency tools – and it doesn't have to be perfect. It just fills a very urgent gap: real-time outcomes-based accountability. Otherwise spend will keep being diverted – and there is little time left to lose.

Presenters throughout the Future of TV Advertising in Sydney demonstrated growing consensus to shift away from the reach and volume game of old and embrace real-time outputs and audience engagement that also ensure a price premium is retained for addressable TV against the social platforms. But even as these conversations dominated discussions onstage, ING’s CMO was making a plea for her agency and media partners to get sharper on commercial metrics, detailing the complex return on marketing investment approach she’s built to keep her CEO and CFO onside.

“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.

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”.