AdTech’s been around now for the better part of 20 years and was to have eviscerated Mass Media by now:
“We’ve reached the end of the era of mass marketing”, 2004 Forester Research
“The :30 spot is either dead, dying, or has outlived its usefulness”, 2005 Life After The :30 Spot
“Let’s just declare TV Dead and move on”, 2006 Tech Crunch
“I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that in 5 years we will laugh at what we had”, 2006 Bill Gates
After all the hyperventilating about the coming apocalypse for TV, here we are….still watching.
AdTech’s first bait and switch came with the utopian nonsense of Social Media and the promise to marketers that they’d have a direct line to consumers for free; just smash that “Like” button and all your marketing fantasies would come true. But alas, it turned out that nobody wanted to have “conversations with brands”. So, the pivot went from organic for free to esoteric for a fee –
These weren’t your fathers’ ads, they were “specialized”, able to deliver to the “right person at the right time”. Marky Mark and the Facebook Bunch either had a colossal naivety about consumer psychology or took advantage of ours. Time and a Trillion dollars proved that you cannot build or maintain a Brand with Big Data and Batch audience type targeting alone, which is more akin to DR than a kin to Branding.
Next up was Netflix and its ad free environment for high production value, scripted programming. For the bargain basement price of $7.99 (in 2014), you were spared the suffering caused by commercials. Nowadays, the only way to maintain that cost is to sit through them. If not, cough up another 10 smackers a month. Although consumers would rather save some coin than dodge some ads, Netflix beware, as you are dangerously close to saturation levels. Over 50% surveyed by research company GFK say that their tolerance has been maxed out and that if the ad load increases, they are going to barf! Well not exactly… but they will however cancel their subscriptions. A full 75% of ads on YouTube are skipped or the content is abandoned completely. The interruption model once proclaimed dead – is still alive and the only thing not, is Facebook “Watch”.
Michael Wolff, author of “Television is the new Television; The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age”, prophetically pointed out that the internet is starting to look far, far more like television than television is starting to look like the internet. Despite all the shell games, a homeostasis of sorts is finally beginning to emerge. TV isn’t going anywhere and AdTech’s long mission to replace it has been graced by its halo in the form of OTT/CTV (probably what Bob Hoffman was alluding to when he said “TV isn’t dying, its having babies”). According to the article “A Cold Wind Blowing: An Impending Investigation Into AdTech”, there were rumblings at last months CES of a soon to be published WSJ investigation into the black box of programmatic advertising that “promises to excoriate the AdTech industry for the fraud and invalid traffic that costs brands billions annually”. It goes on to purport that the pendulum will swing back to CTV – with a warning. “What the streaming business must protect against is the stain and the stink of the digital media business rubbing off on the premium inventory and experience that CTV offers”.
So, calling all advertisers, load up on CTV. And when that fills up… after all that heartbreak and disappointment, after the journey through life’s difficulties that turned out to be a series of lessons, after traversing the long broken road…TV will still be there for you, after all these years.
