Media

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.

One of the global broadcast industry's biggest allies among market analysts, the LA-based Guy Bisson from Ampere Analysis, was brutal, bleak and possibly pragmatic in his keynote to the Future of TV Advertising forum in Sydney earlier this month - everything about the local broadcaster content and distribution system, he said, was bending to the might and scaled economics of global streaming platforms for content and YouTube for distribution. Australian broadcasters had no choice but to "combine", "collaborate" with or "copy" the global platforms. The UK's ITV has started running full-length shows on YouTube, pegging gains in incremental audience reach of 23 per cent but it was still no panacea. "You cannot suck the value out of the bottom of the market by becoming fully reliant on a platform that has a lower CPM," Bisson said. In other words, no-one in the broadcast system has cracked how to find a profitable counter to the new global media world order, including Bisson, and time is running out - so he says roll the dice, find a way that looks nothing like today.        

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.

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”.