(Ad Age) – As streaming TV strategies remain central to advertisers’ marketing plans into 2024, the shift is reshaping the way media buyers invest in TV.
There is increasingly a shift to separate streaming buys from broader television advertising strategies, resulting in a media buying landscape that appears completely transformed compared to previous years. Amid viewership data, bidable inventories, and automated workflows, television shows themselves, once central to advertising buying decisions, appear to be an afterthought in the modern age of investment in television.
This also comes as marketers look to take advantage of the technological capabilities inherent in digital platforms as a way to reduce costs in a market that some buyers say is the softest in decades.
Buyers remember the bygone days of streaming deals, poring over new programming for early shows and determining which could become the next big hit.
“We used to, on Friday morning, sit down with the programming grid and turn on what we wanted to buy in red, yellow and green so that we would know the following week when we were going to market what we wanted in our plans,” said Carrie Drinkwater, director of Mediahub Global investments. “Those days are over.”
Now, buyers are strategizing their media plans around a theoretically infinite supply of digital inventory, planning by the equation of which audience is watching on which platform. Automated programmatic platforms are now tasked with color-coding where campaigns run. And everything may change again when the unknown potentials of AI fully emerge.
Artificial intelligence
Every agency holding company has been investing in artificial intelligence, some to analyze data and others to build client management platforms. But in the media investment space, AI is more outdated in the area of programmatic buying and predictive modeling. Emerging uses of the technology, many of which have focused on image and video generation, or chatbots, have not impacted the day-to-day lives of media buyers, Drinkwater said. And for jobs where AI could have future implications, such as media planning, the technology is not yet sophisticated enough, according to the specialist.
“When I think about the day-to-day, task-oriented things, whether it’s billing or traffic, there’s a lot of nuance in terms of the wrong unit and it could cost you half a million dollars,” Drinkwater said. Instead, he said, the immediate impact for agencies is most obvious in the realms of creativity and data analytics.
“AI can tell a lot about the past,” Drinkwater said. “I don’t think I can tell you everything you need to know about the future yet.”
The audience is king
The phrase “content is king” is no longer as true as it was in the heyday of “Must See TV.” Viewership data now reigns supreme as TV buying shifts from linear to streaming and digital platforms, where an advertiser typically pays a platform-level CPM, or cost per 1,000 impressions, and compares it to the data to reach the desired audience.
While some buyers have outlined specific percentages of media dollars spent on audience-based buys, one buyer who spoke to Ad Age said that in today’s market, 100% of clients’ spend is based on audience, because It goes through the same workflow, whether that means the purchase is highly targeted or more like the broad demographics of yesteryear.
“We’re looking closely at whether the industry has gone too far in audience-based buying,” said the buyer. “Are all impressions created equal so you only care about audience? I’m not 100% sure it should. to go that far, or that it should focus solely on the audience without other layers on top: audience plus attention plus context.”
2024-02-29 15:52:03
#television #investment #strategies #evolving #Adlatine
