TV and Digital as we know them are dying and will eventually be reborn as a new Medium….. “NOSICAMDAP TV” ! Not that long ago, touting TVs demise was just part of marketing discourse. To do so nowadays is marketing suicide.
Yesterday:
“We’ve reached the end of the era of mass marketing” – Forester Research
“The :30 spot.. is either dead, dying, or has outlived its usefulness. Take your pick” – Joseph Jaffe in Life After The :30 Spot
“Let’s just declare TV Dead and move on” – Tech Crunch
“Traditional TV won’t be here in 7-10 years” – Wired
Today:
“The medium is thriving!” – Comcast Spotlight
“The vast majority of people are still watching traditional TV, including younger GenZ and Millennials”- CMO.com
“A new Era of free TV is on the horizon” – any random Blog
Also not that long ago, espousing the miracle of Digital Media was just part of marketing discourse. To do so nowadays would be marketing silliness. So, what happened? What’s with TV being back in fashion and the digital band wagon hitting a fender bender? A flurry of effectiveness studies are bombarding Adland and they all say something similar; that TV has proven to be the top Media for return on investment while at the same time propping up Digital which is already struggling to live up to the hype. Suddenly… bashing TV and praising Digital are both a big ‘no-no’. We’ve gotten past both Tele-pocalypse and Digi-mania and are finally viewing both with much overdue levelheadedness.
In the famous sci-fi horror movie, The Fly (starring David Hedison in 1958 and Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 remake) scientists tinker with a tele-pod; a disintegrator-integrator sort of device, which inadvertently merges a man and an insect to form an obscene new species. Although the TV/Internet fusion which would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago is not exactly a horror show, sorting through the literature it has spawned is. The race for dominance in the new space(s) has Comcast, Direct TV, Spectrum, Dish, Fios, Cox, Altice, Open AP, ATSC 3.0, Project OAR, Networks, Ownerships, Cable providers, and a liter of AdTech platforms producing more information, graphs and white papers than you can shake a TV antenna at. New TV / OTT TV / Smart TV / IP TV / Connected TV / Advanced TV / Multi-platform TV / Data-Driven Linear Addressable TV / Programmatic TV…… N.O.S.I.C.A.M.D.A.P. TV!
All share a similar narrative: A) TV and Digital need to “stop fighting”. B) Digital will unlock the true power of TV.
The former suggests that they have been exhaustively exchanging blows like two well-conditioned prize fighters in the ring, when in actuality Digital has been swinging furiously at a gigantic oaf who’s only defense was to let the other punch itself out. Not having any success with trying to ruin TV, AdTech’s new tactic is to either be more like TV or cozy up to it. The latter is a slight tweak on a bygone scare tactic – from “The days of Mass Marketing were numbered” to “The days of Mass Marketing existing without Digital are numbered”. But Mass Media has worked like a charm forever. It doesn’t need Digital, Digital needs It.
Here’s but just 1 example, for now: 4C is a “Global marketing technology company that delivers a unified platform for audience discovery, media execution, and performance analysis.” At the center of their business is a DMP called Scope by 4C and a television monitoring network called Teletrax which measures the bounce experienced in Social Media interactions post TV ad events. Their 4Q18 State of Media Report (formerly the State of Social, which is now evidently too passé’) is a sales pitch disguised as a white paper about Direct to Consumer Brands. Indeed, if a Martian got its tentacles on one of these reports, it’d be puzzled to observe in image after image, solitary members of a species starring gleefully at a screen. AdTechnicians like to boil our consumerism and humanity down to what we do online, but that’s another story. D2C’s offer a particularly compelling examples for AdTech to hold up as success stories built on digital marketing tactics. Mainly because they can’t compete with incumbent brands’ marketing budgets and distribution channels D2C’s have creatively leveraged data/insights to find audiences online through social and other platforms. “Because they own the transactional relationship” 4C’s Client Success Director, Peter Malile says “these (D2C) brands can collect valuable data in house and predict future customers through tools like lookalike audiences”. If you google Scope you will get this at the top of the SERP; “Behold the first self-serve platform to unify audience discovery, activation, and analytics across TV, Social, Digital, and Mobile. It’s all in Scope!. From traditional television to digital platforms, marketers are turning to video formats more and more in order to reach and engage audiences across screens. In fact, as of Q4, nearly 60% of advertising that runs through 4C includes video assets.”. Let’s pause right here. Video “assets” they say…then immediately pivot. “To find the brands that are advertising the most across broadcast and cable in the US and UK we use our Teletrax TV monitoring network.” When they talk about advertising on Video assets, they don’t mean broadcast and cable. They mean the sliver of Advanced TV inventory that is available + Snap Originals on Snapchat + Pinterest Max Width Video Ads + LinkedIn Video Ads + Facebook Watch + YouTube + the long tail of online video. All Teletrax does is monitor Broadcast TV; there’s no access to inventory.
The end game is audience based TV buys and in the meantime calling everything “TV” by broadening its definition to include anything that is Video. NOSICAMDAP TV is the best option for audience based campaigns due to the favorable nature of the ad environment, but nonetheless the default option if you can’t afford the spotlight. Mass Marketing and TV get an advertiser very high visibility. NOSICAMDAP TV is more narrowly focused. It’s an “advancement” in capability, not an advancement in TV’s already ideal ability to deliver the best ratio of reach and impact.
