The summer can be a slow period for many companies, however the economic downturn, supply chain issues, rising inflation rates and world events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn’t take time off when the rest of us did. Now heading into the fall, a lot of media execs are trying to strategize for a business environment that doesn’t reflect how it used to look even six months ago. 

At Digiday, we spent the summer following these subtle – and not so subtle – changes to the industries we cover and narrowed down key trends that either emerged or expanded during the past few months. On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, my co-host Tim Peterson and I unpacked the biggest takeaways from that time period as well as chatted through what this could mean for media companies’ fourth quarter and the start of 2023.

Some trends we covered this summer:

Advertising takes a hit

Tim: Roku, on its second quarter earnings call, talked about how it saw a slowdown in advertising and it attributed to the scatter market. The scatter market is this jargon term that’s basically just advertisers … not committing to these year-long deals to spend millions of dollars with a TV network [but] placing those buys on a quarterly basis. It’s more digital, where you place your buys almost immediately. And that’s where Roku saw the softness.

And so I think that fits with a lot of the digital media companies or more digital-heavy media companies seeing softness in advertising too, because if you’re an advertiser and you’re worried about how much money you’re spending, or you need to shift budget around, you look for where’s it going to be easiest to shift budget around. We saw that in spring 2020 [and] we’ve been seeing that over summer 2022.

Kayleigh: [Publishers are saying that] advertisers have slightly different goals. A big KPI that I’ve heard is looking for conversion metrics, but it’s not always [about] getting to the point of checkout. There’s also an eagerness to raise certain engagement metrics too, like shares or click-through. So I think that is changing for certain categories [as well] and what products they’re willing to spend on right now and which ones they’re not. And I don’t think that it’s the same [for all] categories.

Tim: These big commitments with the big media companies, the big TV network owners, the big advertisers, those have held steady, at least for now. I think we still have to see what the fourth quarter is going to look like.

E-commerce is slowing down

Kayleigh: One of the areas that will be very interesting to follow in Q4 is how commerce is performing, but beyond that, how advertising and commerce converge or drift apart. Going back to KPIs, there is a push around conversions in campaigns that advertisers have with digital media publishers, but there is that expectation that whatever campaigns they’re …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron