The bottom line, Sable explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, is that TV advertising will need to rise to the quality level of the programs themselves.
Noting that he predicted 10 years ago that Amazon would have brick-and-mortar stores, Sable says, “Netflix within the next two years will have advertising. They have to, in my view. Amazon’s already going to be there.”
This means “we’re going to have more and more opportunities to put more and more great advertising” around premium content.
A once widely held view that with the rise of digital most video content would be user-generated hasn’t quite worked out, according to Sable, citing “the cat peeing on your shoes that everybody would share. That’s such crap. It’s exactly the opposite.”
In recent years, producers who once shunned TV are flocking to its seemingly endless channels. “They all want to be back in TV because the budgets are high, the production quality is huge,” Sable says.
Of course, someone has to pay for all that content and “advertising has to be as good as the content that you put it around.”
While for many of Y&R’s clients TV “has to be that branded piece, to create the brand image,” more companies beginning to understand that “Amazon is DTC and so is e-commerce.”
With a drive toward direct-to-consumer even in staid consumer packaged-goods categories, there’s more concern now about “how do my ads look different, how do they sound different, what’s the call to action, what’s the offer? What’s the pricing. These have to be in there,” Sable says. “You see it with the Warby Parkers, you see it with the Caspers.”
Even companies like Facebook and Amazon are buying “a ton” of traditional TV. “How come they’re not just on Google or Facebook or Amazon? Because they’re smart.”
Asked about the proceedings at CES, Sable prefers to think of the annual event as more about innovation than technology per se. While he was impressed by a new LG screen that folds up like a window shade, he’d like to see more visibility around 5G cellular service “because so much of what we’ve seen is going to be dependent on 5G.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“Let’s be very clear. This is not like everybody woke up this morning and discovered that they were giving their data away,” the Global CEO of Y&R says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference. He was referencing the ability of companies like Cambridge Analytica being able to harvest vast amounts of Facebook data.
“I think the big revelation was Cambridge not just taking your data and my data if it was us, but then taking our friends’ data as well. I think it was that complete vacuuming that freaked everybody out.”
The resulting awakening is how many people make money off of other peoples’ data. With regard to Facebook, “The original deal was yeah you get to target me, which is okay” because television advertisers have always targeted audiences. “In return for that you watched all these great shows for free.”
One difference was that TV networks and advertisers “didn’t make extra money” from audience targeting.
“These guys are making a fortune by limiting, if you will, access to you. They’re the guardian between you and everything else. And it’s not just Facebook. It’s Google, it’s everybody,” Sable says.
He’s long thought that perhaps digital companies should share their revenue with users whose data is the source of that revenue. “What does it cost me to be on your platform? Take that out of the equation. I’ll give you that money up front,” is how he articulates it.
After all, direct-response advertisers have always been willing to pay an “allowable” to secure new customers. That could be, say, $400 for an automaker will to pay to generate test drives. “If they’re spending four hundred dollars to get you into a car and they’re giving that four hundred to Facebook, why shouldn’t Facebook give you two hundred?” Sable asks.
“The truth is, at some point you should be in charge of your data and you should be able to control the amount of money that you either want to take in or give out or whatever.”
Asked about the continued evolution of linear TV ad formats, Sable says he’s “not sure what the new form factor is.” Back in 1976, his agency was experimenting with 15-second ads. “Now we’ve split it in half. Big deal.”
Sable is skeptical about one-to-one marketing being a cure-all for brands, given how “serendipitous” human beings are on their circuitous paths to purchase.
“That’s why you hear more people talking about brand,” he says. “As the Facebooks and the rest began to discover that in fact people weren’t necessarily going that pathway and buying specific things, they started themselves talking about brand advertising. They knew about serendipity.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>During the same time period, user-generated content has taken a back seat to high-quality creative production informed by data insights that aren’t just focused on micro targeting audiences, Sable says in this interview with Beet.TV. He links the return of storytelling in part to the debunking of the “myth” that user-generated content on digital platforms would reign supreme.
“It’s a disaster because YouTube can’t monetize the cat peeing on your shoes,” Sable says. Some people thought user-generated content “was the greatest content in the world and maybe it got a million shares but frankly, who cares? Nobody wants to be associated with it.”
He describes the aspects of Cannes devoted to the creative craft “astounding” in the beautiful and smart work that derives from consumer insights. “You’re going to see data being used not just to micro target but being used to derive insights about audience and motivation and values so the work is smarter and better,” he says.
Discussing the impact that social platforms have had on the process, he points out that message length—be it 15, 30 or 60 seconds—is irrelevant. That’s part of the traditional network television construct in which advertisers paid for a certain amount of time. “The beauty is you don’t have to pay for the time in the same way that we did,” Sable says. “Do what you will.”
Another recent trend he sees, particularly on digital platforms, is advertisers being more up front about the messages they are delivering on their own behalf and who gets paid to deliver the messages. This extends to celebrities and other endorsers, some of whom got burned publicly by the ill-fated Fyre Festival on a Bahamas island, as Sable notes in an article on Huffington Post. “If they were in a commercial, you’d know they were paid and you’d take it for what it’s worth. To me that’s all fake news. Fyre was a major wakeup call for everybody in the industry for what you can and cannot do.”
Nonetheless, he says the advertising industry can prosper if it can only get beyond what he terms “digibabble,” the adoration of all things digital. “I’d be paying more attention to why Amazon is opening a physical store than I would to their algorithm,” he says.
This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>David Sable is quick to point out that algorithms for TV buying are nothing new, as spot TV was traditionally purchased based on CPM’s—the algorithm of the day. In this interview with Beet.TV, the Global CEO of Y&R discusses the seeming dichotomy that is TV everywhere and the growing urge to micro target audiences.
“It’s complex because the promise of so much data and so much targeting makes one think that that’s what they have to do. That you have to be super targeted,” Sable says.
He references Facebook, Mars and Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard as advocating a wider approach to reaching audiences. “We’ve always looked for better ways to target,” Sable says. “I think the problem is we’re in a world of because we can we do, as opposed to people taking a step back and thinking about it and saying ‘what am I actually targeting.’”
He was experimenting with what is now known as addressable TV advertising roughly 15 years ago at direct-marketing agency Wunderman. And while he believes addressable is “going to be important,” he fears that “hyper micro targeting is creating an echo chamber” that keeps getting smaller.
“Do I really only want to talk to people who are going to buy a car in the next six months, who have a propensity to buy a Ford or a Mercedes and only talk to them? If that’s what you do, you’re going down the wrong path,” he says.
In a parallel vein, he points to analyst prognostications a decade ago about the bleak future for TV programming because it would all go the way of CGI.
“There’s more stuff on location than ever before. Less stuff in studio. Less CGI,” Sable notes. “On the content side, we in the golden age here.”
He agrees with NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino on the need for ad-supported programming that fuels the content of popular platforms like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, as The New York Times reports.
“They’re selling the stuff that advertising has allowed to be created,” Sable says. “They’re just reaping the benefit.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Data’s not new,” Sable tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Thirty years ago, we all grew up using data. Today, we have way more sales data available. The problem is, it is all about what I did 10 minutes ago. The trick is to turn it in to insight that might inform me what I’m about to do 10 minutes from now.”
In a recent LinkedIn post, Sable argued people often mistake applied technology for new technology, saying people tend to see everything that is new as never-before-seen. He says marketers need to know more than basic data about consumers.
“It’s not about Big Data – in our world, it’s about primal data,” Sable tells Beet.TV. “It’s about you as a person – I need to understand who you are and why you’ve done what you did. Otherwise, all I have is a record of what you did 10 seconds ago.
“I need to know more about you. We have more data about your health, we have more data about when you wake up in the morning, when you go to sleep at night, what you buy, where you’re walking. All of this adds to a picture of you as a person that we can use to give you more information.”
We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.
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