Until the virus spreads more widely in the west and until more media organizations start reporting results, the full impact is hard to forecast – but brands have an opportunity to change their approach, says GroupM’s global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wieser says how GroupM is adapting.

“A lot of it right now is just providing information, frankly, to our clients, making sure that they’re keeping the brand safe, that they’re ideally finding ways to add value to consumers, and maybe different ways than they did before,” Wieser says.

“One of the better examples I’m aware of in China was that one athletic apparel brand that encouraged consumers to exercise at home, and an emphasised, ‘Here’s how you can do it, don’t let this stop you from doing what you need to do’.

“I think different categories of marketers can find different ways to be useful. Some of it just requires some creativity, as to what the brand is able to do.”

Group M subsidiary MediaCom’s UK division asked all staff to work from home on Friday, March 13 – a test for its systems to deliver continuity in the event of wider looming restrictions.

The impact of COVID-19 is already wide-ranging, including:

• Ad agency holding groups’ share prices have fallen.
• Several tech and media conferences have cancelled, with some exploring alternative virtual conferences.
• Closure of movie theaters will hit box office takings, forcing several titles to be postponed.
• Italian broadcast group Mediaset reported upward ad revenue declined in March due to COVID-19, whilst several TV productions are being affected.
• Sporting tournaments are being postponed, threatening broadcast exposure, with big question marks over the upcoming Olympics and Euro 2020.

Wieser says some Chinese media owners reported a “curtailment of spending” after the first virus-linked deaths in January.

He suggests postponement of events may have a lesser impact on ad revenue than cancellation, but he worries that particular impact in China will hit global supply chains that begin in Asia.

Still, Wieser – who was “the most-quoted man in advertising” as a Pivotal Research analyst before joining GroupM a year ago – thinks the virus crisis will make clear the value of ad agencies like his new employer.

“Any time there’s significant uncertainty, I think the value, at least, of expert advice only goes up,” he says.

“As we’ve seen, in other periods of crisis, that, certainly, in the last 20 years, that media indices were only more and more important.”

Wieser was interviewed remotely by Beet.TV from his office in Portland, Oregon.

TV stands to be the biggest beneficiary, Wieser tells Furious Corp. CEO Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV at the Future of TV Ads global forum. The bump will be spread across national and local distributors as well as other forms of media.

Political advertising gains are specific to US growth. Wieser has said that the category distorts global forecast figures. In GroupM’s global media forecast for 2020, published on December 9, the firm predicts an overall deceleration of global advertising.

“A lot of economic forces that are impacting the global economy are impacting advertising as well,” says Wieser, adding that most countries around the world are seeing meaningful deceleration and while the US and UK have held up, about a dozen markets are expected to decline. “Global trade wars, the deficit in the US, capital expenditures and weakening production – there are a lot of negative factors going on right now.”

It may be some consolation to the ad industry, then, that deceleration of growth is due to macroeconomics and not industry-specific factors. Wieser points to GDPR as an example of an industry-specific disruption that had “almost no effect on spending.”

Instead, advertising firms should look at their national economic landscapes to predict whether or not they’ll see growth in the next year.

“To the extent that the advertising economy in general is correlated in any given country with economic factors, we see slowing economic conditions in those countries,” says Wieser. “People around the world are making forecasts for their country, we see this in the advertising forecast as well.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Wieser, who was a media and marketing soothsayer at the research firm and is now business intelligence global president for the agency, says TV ad spend will decline – even accounting for new over-the-top advanced ad offerings.

“We are forecasting underlying decline in (US) television, excluding political advertising, of around 2% in 2020,” Wieser tells Beet.TV.

“That includes connected TV. That includes over-the-top. That includes other forms of premium content-related advertising.”

Wieser’s figures come from “This Year, Next Year“, amongst the first of his forecast reports to release whilst at GroupM, which looks at the US advertising market.

In it, Wieser writes: “The trend probably doesn’t improve much any time soon; we expect a -0.2% decline in 2019 and a -2.3% decline in 2020.”

As a medium, television finds itself in the cross-hairs of some conflicting indicators.

• On the one hand, the growth in premium content, subscriptions and on-demand viewing suggests booming appetite for watching TV shows – of all kinds and on any screen.
• On the other, whilst the rise of direct-to-consumer brands is bringing new ad spending in to TV, new nervousness amongst traditional brands is causing a flight of some old spending.

Wieser explains to Beet.TV: “Television remains an incredibly durable and important medium for most of the world’s largest advertisers. It’s still the dominant medium on most media plans. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily keeps growing.”

Adjusting-out political ad spending, GroupM’s forecast expects a 4.8% growth in total US ad spending in 2019, with digital ad spend slowing to 14.7% that year, compared with 21.2% the prior year.

Marginal decline in US TV spending is the new norm. In February, eMarketer forecast TV ad spend would decline at 2.2% in 2019.

But GroupM’s Wieser is more optimistic than that – his report forecasts a 0.2% decline in 2019.

This video was taped at the roof deck of the new GroupM office in downtown Manhattan.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

In seven years a Pivotal Research, a Wall Street equity analyst firm, Wieser carved out a reputation – as senior research analyst – for sharp insight in to the worlds of media and advertising.

Now he has been hired by GroupM, WPP’s media investment arm, as global president for business intelligence.

So, how will things be different for Portland-based Wieser?

“Maybe not so different in some ways than the work I did when I was at Pivotal Research,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But much more centered around what our clients need – which is to say, many of the world’s largest marketers.

“I’ll never claim to know as much as the individual practitioners about what they do on a day to day basis, but I hopefully helped to put it all together in a big thematic view about how everything is evolving.”

GroupM is tasking Wieser with expanding its “thought leadership practice”. According to the company’s announcement: “He will collaborate with GroupM’s agencies and WPP’s broader network to gather, analyze and distribute actionable marketplace intelligence that gives clients insights on markets, audiences, partners and platforms, and supply and demand dynamics.”

Wieser’s affection for agencies isn’t news. Last year, while the market turned bearish on under-pressure agency groups, Wieser told Beet.TV the agencies are “cockroaches, not dinosaurs” – meaning, they will survive.

“I do think that, as they’ve been investing more against what clients really need, that there is an opportunity to resume growth back towards kind of a normal level that we used to see in prior years,” he says.

“Even when I had ‘sell’ recommendations on all of the stocks in the sector, I think there were temporal issues, if you will, and that played out. Most of the group has established something different, or at least they’ve started to invest more heavily (to match clients’ needs).”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix.   This series is sponsored by Telaria.  Please find additional videos from the series on this page. 

A recent ANA survey showed 35% of marketers expanded their in-house media buying capabilities in 2017 – twice as many who had done so the prior year.

But, like so much else in digital, disintermediation is “not a zero-sum game“. And the most-quoted media analyst agrees.

“I generally subscribe to the view first put forward by (Publicis Groupe chairman) Rishad Tobaccowala, that agencies are cockroaches not dinosaurs – they’re very good at surviving,” says Pivotal Research senior analyst Brian Wieser in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Even though what we’re seeing is certainly weakness and it’s more pronounced in North America than it elsewhere, collectively the industry is still growing – not by much, but it’s technically growing organically, if we’re looking at the big holding companies.”

Last year, Wieser observed “depressed ad spending growth”, driven by brands tightening purse strings, that would have “a really negative impact on the growth of the industry”.

In 2018, he sees “pockets of decline”, like at global creative agency networks, as brands question how much advertising they really need to do. And, following a couple of years of scandals which shed the like on shady industry practices like agency kickbacks and rebates, Wieser reports “enhanced contract scrutiny” driving some spending cutbacks.

But this isn’t the end of the story.

“Those things are all having an impact right now,” he adds. “I think that, as you cycle through these things, you do get to point where a rebound will eventually occur.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..

Underwhelming, it seems.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Pivotal Research senior analyst Brian Wieser, who opines on the media business, says advanced TV targeting opportunities will do little to arrest an overall US TV ad spend forecast that has turned marginally negative.

“I don’t believe it causes growth in advertising,” Wieser says. “Bringing digital-like concepts to traditional TV will not cause digital-like growth.

“The only thing that would cause growth above and beyond the trajectory that TV is on, is if TV can appeal to different kinds of advertisers.”

That conclusion will come as controversial to the many tech vendors now operating in the TV space, which are bringing targeting and programmatic trading capabilities to a TV market that has long revolved around buying ads against broad show audiences and demographics.

The new world, thanks to internet-enabled TV devices, instead offers the opportunity to buy individual viewers, no matter what shows they are watching, and to buy those ads with automated real-time bidding.

But Wieser says: “A lot of advanced TV technologies are really more about optimizing. They’re really more about making the workflows more efficient. They’re about load balancing, in terms of maximizing or optimizing reaching frequency.

“Maybe even one day they can help contribute to reduced commercial loads, because they can identify better ways to reach different audiences with different units, which then just allows the media owners to reduce their ad loads.”

Wieser sees scant potential for brands not already advertising on TV, like direct-to-consumer brands, to come in and add incremental spend.

But he says that is “the only thing that would cause any different growth for the industry”.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..

That’s what happened in Europe in 2016 – but the law that was passed affects global companies, too, and the final deadline for compliance is coming this May.

For Brian Wieser, the Pivotal Research senior analyst who is said to be the most-quoted man in advertising and who advises Wall Street on advertising and ad-tech trends, the outcomes are unclear. But one thing is for sure – with just four months to go, many US companies are behind the punch, and playing with fire.

“There’s a whole bunch of possible ways that this could shake out,” says Wieser in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We don’t know. But I think that the bigger problem is that a lot of market participants in the investment community haven’t really thought about it.

“They’re not aware of it. Investors, for the most part, haven’t paid much attention to it. I would daresay most can’t spell ‘GDPR’ yet.”

For the uninitiated, the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in to effect back in 2016, updating prior consumer data protection rules in a significant way. Now any global company which deals with EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, including:

• tighter consent conditions for the collection of citizens’ data.
• consumers can instruct companies to stop processing their data.
• automated decision-making and profiling decisions must be made clear.
• consumers can request decisioning by automated processes be stopped and handled by a human instead.
• they have the right to request an explanation of automated decision-making.
• they can request free access, rectification and deletion of data.

Breaching the new rules risks incurring a fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover, up to a maximum of €20 million. Switched-on companies have spent the last couple of years auditing their exposure, adding required data handling managers and getting compliant. But many are now scrambling to meet the deadline, whilst, with a few months to go and GDPR gaining headlines, others are currently in a big public push to profess their own compliance.

Wieser is uncertain what the effects may be, but they range on a spectrum, starting with a comparison with Y2K, the Millennium Bug, which was warned to be cataclysmic and which passed with little fanfare.

“All of a sudden, it could mean it’s the end of the world as we know it, or nothing will happen,” he says. “Nobody really knows, but do you want to take that chance?”

Whilst may European companies have noted the GDPR step-change, many US commentators seem more inclined to frame it in a context of existing emerging trends.

Wieser sees it as “a different expression of the same problem that Apple is attacking with ITP in the United States”, referring to the how Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention limits the ability of website owners and advertising platforms to track users across domains.

The up-shot of each is to put at risk the current version of digital ad tracking, and place more focus on really knowing actual audience members.

“Marketers have to establish stronger direct relationships with consumers and incenting them to establish strong direct relationships,” Wieser adds.

“When you get to a level of trust between a brand and a consumer, they will hand over their data, because they trust the brand. The European government and Apple, they’re kind of both pushing brands in that direction.”

This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world.  The series is presented by Criteo.  Please visit this page for additional segments. 

For Disney, it’s the appeal of a big, quick deal and the options here and overseas it will deliver for testing various direct-to-consumer offerings. He cites what Sky TV has in Europe and Star has in India, plus a bigger stake in Hulu, along with ESPN’s app launch this year and the standalone Disney branded app in 2019.

“There’s a number of initiatives that Disney will be able to experiment with and see which model of the direct-to-consumer approach works,” the oft-quoted Senior Analyst at Pivotal Research says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018.

On the Fox side, he believes one factor is that the company was “freaked out” by Facebook having expressed a willingness to bid $600 million for five years of cricket game rights in India. It would have cost Facebook $120 million a year in a market with a billion dollars of annual digital ad revenue, which he terms astronomical.

“And if you’re a Fox and you’re looking at what Facebook is willing to do in India, what are they willing to do in the U.S. if that’s the scale at which they’re willing to operate?” Wieser says. “I think there’s an appreciation of the consequences of Facebook, Google, Amazon and even Apple pushing harder into the same space.”

The result will be more consumer choices and lower margins for everyone involved, according to Wieser. He dismisses the notion of “peak TV” wherein content creators will suddenly come to their senses and pare back output, adding “I don’t believe that.”

As far as advertisers are concerned, their TV budgets are “largely independent” of the supply of inventory, according to Wieser. For example, if there were 10% less “sufficiently premium” video inventory, it would not have an impact on the amount of spending in and of itself.

“As long as television is the worst form of advertising except for all those others that have been tried, and it is for large brands that are building or sustaining their brands, and there is no next best alternative, the money will be what the money is,” Wieser says.

While he acknowledges that the largest global agency holding companies are under extreme pressure from mostly client-initiated strictures, he’s less impressed by some in the industry about competition from big consultancies like Accenture. But until such time as of these companies were to buy a WPP or Publicis “or something much bigger, it’s not that big of a difference from what agencies always face.”

According to Pivotal’s Brian Wieser, the biggest marketers are now spending less in a drive to cut procurement costs – and that could affect the mood at upcoming Cannes Lions.

“We’re seeing that play out through depressed spending growth, certainly in the last quarter,” Wieser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“It’s going to be a year of pretty tepid growth. For the media owners, those who are concentrated with large marketers, national TV … I actually forecast slightly negative growth this year.”

What lays behind the bearish forecast? It’s not just the gravitational pull of Facebook and Google. Rather, Wieser sees a confluence of both procurement cost cuts and a new approach to accounting.

“Marketing procurement drives everything, especially when it come stop large brands these days,” he says. “They need to drive costs down one way or another. That got much more aggressive in the last year.

“Layered on top of that is zero-based budgeting, (which means) ‘forget about what ever you (spent) last year, let’s look at everything from scratch’. It necessarily tends to mean lower spending on marketing and paid media.

“The two things coming together are having a really negative impact on the growth of the industry. It is having a depressive effect on all media in general. The shadow over the industry is going to continue for the foreseeable future.”

So Wieser expects a “sour mood” to descent on the upcoming Cannes Lions, the ad industry’s annual celebration of creativity in the south of France.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal also reported ad agencies are cutting costs, as “most ad holding companies are facing political and economic uncertainties, soft first-quarter earnings results and spending cuts by their clients”.

It says WPP wants to spend 25% less on Cannes attendance, Interpublic plans to shave 10% off its Cannes budget, while Dentsu Aegis is curtailing hiring and pay, citing “market weakness” and “clear signs of a slowdown.”

We interviewed him last week at the LUMA Partner’s annual Digital Media Summit.

Under iOS 9, the Safari web browser will support extensions that enable “a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content”. That has been interpreted by many as ad-blocking – something which 4.9% and growing of all internet users did in Q2 2014, according to Adobe and PageFair.

But advertisers shouldn’t sweat, says Pivotal senior research analyst Brian Wieser – ad-free content has been around for a long time. “The reality is probably that ad-blocking in digital is overblown, as ad-blocking in the TV world was overblown,” Wieser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Looking back over time, about 15% of total video viewing was ad-free in the United States. Netflix is around 5% of total viewing – a minority. The absence of advertising by itself doesn’t mean the media is going to die.

“DVR-based ad-skipping probably takes about 5% of total inventory out, so we still have around 80% of potential inventory (left).”

Even if Safari supports ad-blocking (and Apple has far from confirmed that specifically), it may not matter as much as some fear – by far the majority of mobile content consumption happens not on the web, but in apps, which will continue to be powered by display advertising in particular, Wieser adds.

We interviewed Wieser as part of a series on video advertising at Cannes Lions presnted by true[X].  Please find additional videos from the series on this page.