“Each team is trying to optimize their channel and budget,” Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. “By starting with a strategic layer, individual pieces of it are operating within that omnichannel plan.”
He foresees companies developing strategies to address the fragmented media marketplace, giving marketers a way to harness various sources of consumer data to develop a consumer-focused strategy.
“There’s still some technology and data barriers that need to be worked through,” he said. “There’s a lot of people working on that, but we’re still pretty far away from having a reliable, scaled dataset that gives that level of controls to marketers.”
The pandemic’s economic consequences have significantly affected the advertising marketplace, as uncertainties make media planning much more difficult. The lack of predictability is likely to have an effect that outlasts this year’s disrupted upfront sales season.
“We’ve heard for years and years that, ‘Oh, the upfront is outdated and is obsolete, we don’t need it anymore,’ and very little has changed,” Nails said. “Assuming that the networks and media companies see that the sky doesn’t fall on them, they’re still able to sell their inventory, they’re still able to make a good profit, there will be less pressure to go back.
Advertiser demand for greater flexibility is likely to force traditional media companies like TV broadcasters to behave more like digital outlets let marketers adjust campaigns and spending levels with more audience-based targeting. Over-the-top video channels are driving that push into TV.
“That ties in with the change we’re going through in terms of audience-based buying and convergence of traditional linear with OTT,” Nail said. “You don’t necessarily want that schedule locked in months and months in advance. You want some degree of flexibility.”
You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.
]]>Amongst the questions brands are asking Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail – “What is everyone else doing?” and “Should I be cutting my advertising?”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nail says there are no historic models to look to for help – a coronavirus playbook cannot be found in 9/11 nor in the 2008 economic crash.
But Nail knows one thing. “I think the answer is pretty obvious,” he says. “In any sort of industry that requires gathering of people, sports, live entertainment, restaurants, travel, all of those things, you either pull it completely or you dial it back and you change your messaging.”
This week, Twitter revised-down its earlier guidance for Q1 2020 advertising growth, now anticipating a slight decline. eMarketer has revised-down its 2020 ad spend forecast.
Amid the crisis, many marketers are frantically trying to figure out how best to retain sales.
But Nail has another idea.
“Don’t even waste your time thinking about how can you stimulate demand in the short-term,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen, For people who were laid off, until they know how long they’re out of work, they are not going to spend a dime.
“Even those of us who are fortunate enough to still be getting a paycheck, it’s like we’re all going to be real cautious because we just have no idea. Rather than do that, you need to make decisions based on, how do you want your brand to be perceived when this is over and when we come out of it?”
The virus has prompted many brands to reconsider the creative they have out in the market.
Certain companies have pulled ads that depict hugging, hand-shaking or, in KFC’s case, finger-lickin’.
Coors Light has abandoned a campaign which would have depicted it as “the official beer of working remotely”, fearing being seen to make light of people self-isolating.
Forrester’s Nail thinks brands need to think beyond the current virus crisis, and tread carefully.
“Do you want your brand to be perceived as a brand that was helpful, that was empathetic, that understood and tried to support its customers and the community?,” he asks. “Or do you want to come across as a brand that was being very opportunistic and still trying to squeeze money out of people?
“Take that longer-term view and accept the idea that we’re going to go through this revenue chasm for the next number of weeks. Just don’t worry about that, but try to position yourself to be ready to capitalise when this is over. I expect there to be significant pent-up demand, and be there, be the kind of brand people will turn to when they’re ready to start spending again.”
Nail was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam.
]]>Part of this has to do with the TV industry being accustomed to almost 50 years of thinking in terms of age and gender and an infrastructure that supports that.
“We’re about to throw that out and move into a whole different world,” Nail says. “And it just takes time to, first of all, get the infrastructure built up, then to gain the experience with the processes within that infrastructure, and then build up again those benchmarks and that history.”
According to Nail, the TV industry is entering a world in which there will be multiple metrics for different advertisers, sometimes even for the same advertiser with different objectives. This makes it even more complicated for media sellers. There are also risks involved.
“That is my biggest fear,” Nail says. “That TV will end up going down the direct response rathole that digital did in 2000-2001 and has never gotten itself out of. If we do allow TV to go there, we will be doing the brands and ourselves a huge disservice.”
But can the industry balance funnel metrics and brand or revenue business outcome? Nail believes that the industry needs to head towards this balance, and TV as a medium is unique in that there could be payoff in the long-term.
One of the positives is that the finance around advertising will become much clearer, so we could see more companies willing to spend more in order to see more specific outcomes for their brand.
“Now we’re getting better and better tools for tracking,” Nail says. ‘’Whether it’s the cash register, store traffic, web traffic, whatever that business outcome is, we’re getting better tools to measure that which I think will justify the spending on television and video.”
When it comes to the transition away from the cookie, Nail sees a period of chaos as inevitable. He believes that the focus has shied away from the big picture—consumers’ attitudes towards advertising and the invasiveness that is sometimes perceived to come with it.
“There’s a deeper issue of how we do this in a way that consumers feel respected,” Nail says. “And feel like it’s being done more for their benefit than for the advertising ecosystem’s benefit.”
A big part of it is making the value exchange much more explicit, as it has been historically implicit. In being more explicit, Nail sees opportunity for experimentation, especially in giving the user more options to either pay or see ads along with viewing content.
“I have no question that we will get to a good solution in the end,” Nail says. “But it’s never a straight line, it’s always a little bit chaotic for a while, a lot of stuff gets thrown against the wall, but then ultimately we get to a point where we find a really positive solution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>“I think what we recognize is what the industry is dealing with right now, which is the very real divide still between understanding of and the skills associated with traditional linear broadcast and more sort of digital ways of thinking and behaving,” says O’Connell. “So for the sake of the research, we partnered.”
For Nail, who brings more of a traditional TV perspective, this means seeing where digital trends are pointing, and putting a sense of urgency on pulling away from what is comfortable for linear ad buys.
“Something had to be done to figure out how do we change what we’re doing so we can capture those opportunities to get our brands in front of those people,” says Nail. “But clearly it’s going to require pretty significant change in thinking about audiences, what data you use, and the technology platforms that are going to support that.”
O’Connell, whose work has been done mostly on the digital side, admits that there is much to be gained from exploring linear models of TV, but that digital people tended to be a little dismissive of, thinking that TV would look one very certain way in the future. Both analysts agree that there needs to be a happy medium that emphasizes the overlap between both models.
“We had a sea of what I’m now calling peaches and plums, which are really really different,” says O’Connell. “But the hybrid of the two is the beautiful nectarine.”
It’s these “nectarines”, O’Connell says, that will keep the industry evolving while still maintaining an organizational structure that can most effectively adapt.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>So far in the rush to launch new paid streaming TV services, pundit opinion has focused on how providers’ library strengths and finite household capital will end up crowning a winning provider.
But Jim Nail doesn’t see things so black-and-white.
Rather than betting on Disney to kill off Netflix, as many sections of the tech press may depict it, the Forrester Research principal analyst is betting on a more mixed ecology emerging.
“2020 is going to be such a fascinating year, because you’ve got Disney+ launching in a little over a week, November 1,” Nail says. “Hot on the heels of that, you’ve got Apple TV launching (and) HBO Max sometime after the first of the year.
“So far, we’ve kind of lived in a world where there’s Netflix and Hulu and for a long time it was like Netflix was all. You go back three years, people, they’d given up Hulu for dead. But Hulu came on, which to me says the consumers are understanding this world of streaming is not like a ‘one or the other’.”
Nail was talking with his colleague, Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, in this video interview for Beet.TV, at a time when TV has already been up-ended by the emergence of OTT players like Netflix.
But next year is when the game changes. Vertically-integrated SVOD offerings from content owners are causing many syndication rights with Netflix to time-out without renewal, as media companies look to distribute their own shows.
“So now consumer has choice,” Nail says. “Netflix, Hulu, I haven’t even mentioned Amazon, and now Disney, HBO Max, Apple TV. Roku is building up a lot of providers on their platform.
“A lot of people are arguing about ‘will Disney kill off Netflix?’ or whatever. But I think they’re thinking about it wrong, because it’s really about ‘how will consumers make this choice of what is the right combination of these services for them?'”
In her interview with Nail, Forrester’s O’Connell also imagines that the classical subscription model may not be as locked-in as people think.
“Will you just subscribe to something in perpetuity or will there be models where you essentially can subscribe for a week to binge-watch the show you want or subscribe to the show and then walk away?,” she wonders.
Nail also offered his insight on two just-inked deals in the connected TV advertising space.
AT&T’s Xandr buying Clypd, a sell-side platform for digital and linear TV ads:
“I think it’s a really interesting acquisition. Clearly it is going to give Xandr a lot of power to reach beyond just the Time Warner media assets that are within the AT&T family where they are now.”
Roku buying dataxu, a demand-side platform for connected TV ads:
“I see that as more of a straight technology purchase. Roku had cobbled together some internal technology that everybody I talked to said it was just terrible, really primitive. And rather than build on that or build something new, it was much smarter for Roku to buy it. They’ve got very ambitious plans for their advertising revenue stream and this I think will help accelerate them.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>O’Connell’s observations are based on research Forrester has done plus findings from other sources. Combined they indicate that “you just generally find the reported engagement rates for the digital channels are just generally much lower,” she says.
It doesn’t matter whether a respondent is 55 or younger and more progressive, where engagement is nonetheless “pretty low.”
Asked whether this knowledge flies in the face of big shifts in marketers’ ad budgets to the digital realm, O’Connell says there’s nothing wrong with being where one’s consumers are.
“The question is, what are we doing with those opportunities when we have them with these people? What do you make of that moment you have to grab their attention?”
She cites shortcomings like “frequency run amuck” and hyper personalization of ads without fully understanding how consumers are actually perceiving such personalization. “We just have a lot of problems.”
Some of the research Forrester found shows that in general, “you will find that in premium environments response rates are in fact better. So there is value in being associated with these high quality publishers.”
What constitutes “premium”? This is where much of the complexity arises, because brands like Huggies might want to advertise in content that Vice would shun to promote “an edgy content series. It doesn’t fundamentally mean that one is bad content and another is good, or one is high quality and another is low quality. It means understanding what’s appropriate in that moment,” says O’Connell.
So for the time being, consumers will continue to lead a revolution while the advertising industry attempts to manage an evolution involving varying infrastructure, organizational design and “lots of business rules that is hard to flip upside down.” She will be conducting more research to examine success stories in the “practical realities” of omni-channel advertising along with her colleague, Jim Nail.
“I hope we find great examples of that happening, because I want us to be able to say ‘here’s a model for how it can work.’ I don’t know yet what I’m going to find.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“These numbers to me really indicate that we’re at that inflection point, and after all these years of talk and headlines, conferences about it, it’s actually going to start happening,” says Jim Nail, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
Nail presented the findings of the ANA/Forrester State of TV and Online Video Survey at RampUp 2018, the two-day LiveRamp conference. In this interview with Beet.TV, Nail explains why the annual TV Upfront ritual isn’t going away anytime soon and why marketers need to be “data detectives” in evaluating providers of advanced audience-targeting data.
According to the Rogers diffusion of innovations theory, once 15% of market participants have adopted a new innovation and 30% represent the early mainstream, “you’re at the inflection point, the proverbial hockey stick where the adoption accelerates rapidly,” Nail says.
In the survey, 28% of marketers reported being knowledgeable about addressable TV but haven’t yet entered the market, while 18% said they were aware of it but don’t know enough to use it and 6% said they were not at all aware of it.
While the industry is “not going to abandon the Upfronts anytime soon,” mainly owing to greater demand for primetime inventory than there is supply, advanced TV targeting is playing an ever-increasing role in negotiations, according to Nail.
Nail is “really excited” about some of the companies that are building the tools that buyers need to build TV schedules based on audience targeting beyond age and gender. “No buyer wants to be dependent on the data that the seller is telling them ‘here’s who our audience is.’ LiveRamp is certainly making a big contribution to the development of this area,” he says.
These data providers enable buyers to “let me do my planning myself and then go to the sellers and negotiate from that basis.”
He calls automatic content recognition technology that helps to track TV viewing and ad exposure “a very promising area of data.” Then he cautions that marketers entering the space need to become data detectives.
“All of those platforms promise a lot but you can’t take it at face value. You’ve got to ask who are these users that you’re getting this data from, how representative are they of the viewing audience as a whole.”
It boils down to “classic market research nuts and bolts methodology stuff to make sure that the data that you’re getting is really as high quality, as solid as the traditional data sets, like Nielsen, MRI and Simmons.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>A new Forrester report, “Solving Digital Video Advertising’s Premium Dilemma“, commissioned by outstream video ad vendor Teads from Forrester, spotlights a disconnect between the two camps.
“Media companies talk about the user experience,” Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail, who authored the report, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But then the advertising agencies talk about the quality of the data used for targeting.
“So it seems like the media companies are still stuck a little bit in the old world. (They say), ‘We’ve got great content…’. Advertiser agencies are saying, ‘That’s important, but, in this new world, the targeting is at least as important’.
“The media companies need to have a deeper conversation with the advertisers to make sure they’re building the data strategy.”
Forrester’s report says publishers are struggling with insufficient video ad inventory to satisfy advertiser demand, but that advertisers report so-called “outstream” ads, which play in between chunks of text, helps alleviate concerns around viewability and enable programmatic buying.”
We interviewed Nail last week at a Teads industry summit in New York.
]]>In addition, DVR penetration is slowing down, and Forrester’s Research find that 25% of consumers with DVRs don’t watch anything on them, while another 30% only watch about five shows a month on the DVR. “Is it worth the etxra $5 to $10 a month?”
Nail also expects that marketers will be drawn into deeper business discussions around media modeling, revenue lift, share of voice and other topics as cross-screen advertising and measurement progresses. For more insight into OCR and measurement, check out this video interview. During the discussion, Nail is joined by Andrew Feigenson of Nielsen, SVP Digital Client Services at Nielsen, and Amanda Richman, President, Investment and Activation, Starcom USA.
Beet.TV spoke to Nail recently in New York at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion. In this earlier interview, Nail dived into the future of the DVR in greater detail.
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Asked by moderator Ashley Swartz of Furious Minds whether marketers are using quantitative or qualitative methods to judge campaigns, guests emphatically said: both!
“CMOs are trying to be more quantitative – but they’re also forced to be short-term,” Nielsen’s digital client services SVP Andrew Feigenson said.
“They always talk about the average life expectancy of a CMO. The moment the brand is not resonating, the CMO also has a problem, because the CEO is going to pick up on that. There has to be a qualitative/quantitative balance.”
Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail echoed: “That idea that there has to be a binary decision is exactly what keeps us stuck in this period. There’s a lot of stumbling around. We haven’t broken the old models. It’s a much more complex world – we’re going to have another two to three years of random experimentation until we find that new formula.”
And Starcom USA investment and activation president Amanda Richman said marketers are still using the “funnel” approach to assessing campaigns:
This is an exciting time because of the mix of art and science. There are many more formats we can start developing beyond 15- and 30-(second ads) – pushing more in to 6-second and shorter-form, but also long-form.”
Watch the full video for more of their lively discussion.
]]>“Up to this point, the DVR has been main alternative to linear television – it has trained consumers to get whatever they want whenever they want it,” Jim Nail tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Consumers aren’t quite ready to jump in, both feet, to online. As consumers get more and more in to dabbling with online and they find new sources and new ways to get it, I believe that, ultimately, online can kill off the DVR.”
Nail just published a report on the topic for Forrester.
He also says advertising should consider the unique characteristics of individual new platforms in a holistic marketing mix. Watch the full video for more of his great insight.
Nail was speaking at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization, hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion.
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