Media Buying Briefing: ‘It’s tough to fight City Hall’ Why more TV ad dollars aren’t following audiences to digital and social video

By Michael Bürgi

Although it generated a few headlines when it was announced in late February, YouTube’s move to present its content wares to media buyers and clients smack in the middle of “upfront week” when the main broadcast and cable networks present, wasn’t quite earth-shaking news. But should it have been?

Should linear TV be worried that the single largest generator of ad revenue (Google) in media has put a target on the $20-billion-plus upfront marketplace in a bid to suck up a larger share of dollars? And more broadly, should media buyers and their advertiser clients be thinking beyond linear TV, given the inexorable trend away from TV viewing in the classic sense and toward Gen Z-driven platforms like TikTok, Snap, Twitch and even Instagram, as well as YouTube?

That’s not really happening yet, and one major head of investment at an agency holding company, who declined to speak for attribution in order to speak more candidly, thinks they know why.

“A lot of our clients are tied to these market mix models, and a lot of those models don’t give digital in general the attention and value that I think the viewer gives to those platforms,” said the veteran buyer. “And those models continue to reinforce spending all your money on linear television.”

Part of the problem, explained Matt Voda, CEO of OptiMine, a cross-channel marketing analytics firm, is that marketing mix modeling in TV remains archaic and time consuming to analyze, especially for advertisers that need to pivot more quickly. “The traditional way of marketing mix modeling will always favor TV because it can’t get to a level of detail” that allows brands to adapt their investment and activation faster as using social video, said Voda. “We’re looking at revenue, not long-term brand impact, but on a dollar-for-dollar outcome, paid social will always outperform TV on a consistent basis when you get down to that kind of detail.”

As the CEO of one digital video company (who declined to speak on the record in order to not offend potential clients) put it, “What I often hear from agency folks is, it’s tough to fight City Hall — meaning that at the client there’s baked-in inertia from decades of market mix modeling and media attribution that the client believes,” said the exec. “Nobody’s getting fired for recommending what’s worked for the last 20 years.”

And yet, audiences — particularly younger audiences that advertisers have trouble reaching on traditional TV platforms — are flocking to digital and social video, from video games to social platforms. According to recent figures out of Tubular Labs, which measures viewership across the digital spectrum, social video especially outdelivers TV consumption for the Gen Z and millennial audiences by a large margin. Based on February 2022 numbers, Tubular estimated that 25-44 year-olds in U.S. watched 5.85 billion total minutes of the top 10 U.S. media & entertainment creators on YouTube and Facebook alone.

Yes, that’s billion with a B.

Still, resistance persists. “I’m still not …read more

Source:: Digiday