In this episode, I am very happy to welcome our good friend and industry leader Sean Cunnigham, CEO of the VAB, previously known as the Video Advertising Bureau. The VAB is the essential advertising industry organization for the television programmers, networks and the entire TV industry.
An ad man in previous life, Sean has been at the helm of the organization for 18 years and has seen a lot of changes.
Probably none as dramatic as what is happening now with the big switch to audience-based buying versus age and demo. Sean and his team have been guiding the industry through this transition. In this interview, speaks to the big changes in TV ad investment and what it all means from recent market research.
Sean also addresses the value and shortcomings of panels and the problems with accuracy of the Nielsen ratings during the pandemic. He says the industry expects transparency and hopes the Nielsen will fix the problems which largely remain.
A great conversation. Thank you Sean for this insightful interview. And thanks for your friendship and support for Beet.TV
And thanks to our podcast sponsor Mediaocean
And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>VAB, an insights-driven organization dedicated to answering marketers’ toughest questions, says it pulled a century of economic data and found one key finding – investment in brand-building pays off.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean Cunningham, VAB President & CEO, reflects on a year that, for some, may have been as much “make” as it was “break.”
Spending through turmoil
Cunningham says many brands did, indeed, double down this year. Brands like Hotels.com, for example, returned to TV advertising in June.
“We tracked nationally that we’ve seen $460 million worth of new advertising come into the national platform – 110 new brands in 59 categories,” Cunningham says.
“Their heaviest spending period was in the toughest part of the pandemic.
“(In) the three months in the beginning of the economic downturn, we saw a great number of advertisers with very sophisticated data analytics decide to launch on TV in that environment and to great effect.”
On 12/14, we'll be hosting our first complimentary Industry Spotlight Webinar featuring @AHorihuela of @fuboTV & @Inghelbrecht of @TatariTV. Together, they'll share learnings and success strategies for data-driven linear TV buying. REGISTER
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— VAB (@VABintel) November 24, 2020
Victors amid chaos
VAB’s research shows brands like Amazon, Walmart, T-Mobile, General Mills and Hershey used the ’08 recession to catapult their growth.
Amazon, for instance, launched its first TV campaign in the middle of the recession in 2008 and saw a compound annual growth rate of 34% between 2008-2012.
VAB’s analysis across 400 brands showed that those who increased spend saw a nearly 70% increase in ROI versus brands that decreased their spend.
Meanwhile, in a study during the 2008 recession, brands that kept their share of voice flat relative to their competitors did not experience any profit growth, whereas 38% of brands who planned increases to their share of voice experienced very large profit growth, VAB’s analysis shows.
Time is now
“For a sophisticated marketer, now is not the time to cut, now is not the time to play it safe,” Cunningham says. “Now is the opportunity to share efficiently in a downmarket.”
“When there is a downturn in certain categories in the amount that people are advertising, now is absolutely the time to invest in the simple principles like making sure that your share of voice eclipses your share of market.
“The return on that in terms of big results is super clear. One of the things that we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of smart, savvy advertisers that are data- and analytically-driven who actually saw 2020 as launch time.”
Hear the perspectives from the leaders and authors of our work for an insider's view on the most important topics in the industry.
— VAB (@VABintel) November 20, 2020
Booming audiences
Cunningham suggests the advertiser opportunity is evident in terms of audience availability. During the pandemic, TV viewing has swelled:
- “67% of people that we polled said that the television set became the center of their house.”
- “50% said they had a dedicated TV set to a news channel pretty much 24/7.”
- “over a third of that population that we pulled went and got another subscription service and went and got another AVOD service.”
“2020 is a year that I think some of us want to forget, but there are changes that we’ll always remember,” Cunningham adds. “The acceleration that we saw … really put us probably a couple of years forward in our evolution. That it’s a good thing for marketers, particularly data-driven marketers.”
You are watching “Targeted Strategies, Big Impact: TV Powered by Data, Addressability and Consumer Choice,” a leadership video series from Beet.TV and VAB presented by New York Interconnect. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But TV is now a medium that can drive results even for upstarts, according to a new piece of research.
The Halo Effect, a report from VAB and Comcast Advertising’s Effectv, examined direct-to-consumer (D2C) and 50 other brands to discover the effectiveness of launching a TV ad campaign.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, James Rothwell, Comcast Advertising’s VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations, explains the findings.
RELEASED TODAY
Our new report in collaboration with @effectv, "TV as a Growth Engine," and the latest in #TheHaloEffect series, provides a rich analysis of the impact that TV has on a brand’s digital storefront and platform.
— VAB (@VABintel) November 17, 2020
Traffic driver
“On the month of that TV launch, all brands, no matter what their age, saw double digit growth,” Rothwell says.
- “The younger brands saw the largest jump of around 23% increase in their total unique website visitors.”
- “When they weren’t on air there was a halo effect of TV’s impact with younger brands, they were able to sustain some growth through those channels, reinforcing the TV messaging.”
- “Those that were able to stay on air they had the resources to do so with an ongoing TV campaign were able to see 80% growth in digital engagement while on television.”
“The real takeaway for us was – it doesn’t matter how old the brand is; if you have the opportunity to invest in television early, you can exponentially grow your business very, very quickly.”
For example, eco-friendly cleaning products company Blueland saw a 65% jump in website traffic after launching a TV ad campaign, the report found.
Future of D2C
EMarketer analysis suggests D2C ecommerce sales would hit $17.75 billion in the US in 2020, up from $14.28 billion in 2019 – 2.6% of total ecommerce.
But eMarketer thinks growth rate will tail off in the emerging economy as many items are non-essential and customer acquisition costs are rising.
To gain cut-through, many D2C brands are turning to TV. That is different for a category that has traditionally built its name in online, social media. Indeed, the “D” in “D2C” may as well stand for digital.
Why wait?
But many D2C brands that turn to TV are finding the reach and impact, indeed, provides the platform they need.
“Typically, (it is) around eight years before a DTC brand invests in television,” Rothwell adds.
“But, more and more, we’re seeing brands are accelerating that up in their timeline and accelerating their TV investment strategies because they’ve seen what it’s been able to do. (It can) catapult them to that next level of growth much quicker than maybe if they’d waited.”
Rothwell cites targeting as one capability that addressable TV can bring, helping new, digital-side marketers see a pathway to TV. He says “it’s a great time to do test and learn”, starting with basic messaging and working toward real-time optimization.
]]>“Our roots are very much in local advertising,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “That said, we are not a local advertising sales business anymore. We are an audience delivery company.”
Rooke shared his thoughts in this first episode of two conversations with Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of video advertising trade group VAB. Beet.TV and VAB co-produced the video series.
‘Sports Audience Didn’t Go Anywhere’
The company has a vast trove of viewing data gleaned from set-top boxes that can be harnessed for audience-based targeting, instead of media buys based on TV networks and dayparts. The data have provided numerous insights, including how the temporary suspension of live sports during the coronavirus pandemic have triggered a shift in viewing habits.
“The sports audience didn’t go anywhere. They didn’t stop watching TV,” Rooke said. “Their viewership has moved elsewhere, in particular to places like news.”
That audience likely is to return as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League resume play — with TV offering the only venue to see games held in empty stadiums. The National Football League next month starts its regular season, which will be significant for linear TV viewership.
Strategies for Brands
With advertisers seeking ways to reach audiences more efficiently, audience-based targeting can help to expand the reach of campaigns and improve return on investment (ROI), Effectv’s Rooke said. The company recently analyzed more than 100,000 campaigns and 30 million commercial airings to find that campaigns airing on more networks had double the reach than on 10 or fewer networks, regardless of spending level.
The health crisis has had a significant short-term effect on media spending, including an expected 18% decline in U.S. TV advertising excluding political campaigns this year, as forecast by GroupM, the media-buying unit of WPP. The firm expects a rebound of 5.9% in TV advertising next year as the economy continues to recover.
Comcast also has worked to develop content to connect advertisers with consumers at the local and national levels. As one example, the company developed a “Hometown Hub” on its Xfinity X1 platform to help viewers find local businesses, including ones that were opening as pandemic lockdowns were lifted.
At the national level, it created a virtual showroom for automotive brands seeking to reach homebound consumers, Rooke said.
He foresees the continuation of several shifts that will change how advertisers reach audiences on a broader variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets and TVs. Advertisers will measure reach based on impressions rather than gross ratings points, and will seek to measure how their campaigns affect business outcomes like sales.
“None of those things are groundbreaking insights, I know that,” Rooke said. “What I think is interesting is that the mindset shifts that have taken place in the last five months” of the pandemic.
]]>VAB and Beet.TV are launching an upcoming series called “TV Reset” that chats with industry leaders about consumer behaviors during the pandemic. Much of this partnership is linked to the consumer study that VAB did called As Time Goes By: How Media Consumption is Helping America Cope.
“Let’s peel back the curtain and be able to hear of how they’re dealing with the flexibility that I know that marketers are looking for,” DeLauro says. “What’s going on with live sports, I know there’s a lot of questions about that, about programming, and the programming hiatus that’s going on now and how that’s going to be dealt with, and overall how they’re just talking to each other about marketers expectations and what’s going to happen in the future.”
DeLauro highlights two main takeaways from this study. The first is that maintaining a share of voice now will cost brands less in the future.
“When I say maintain your share of voice, that doesn’t mean that you have to maintain your spend,” DeLauro says. “It just means that you have to maintain where you are compared to your competition. And sometimes your competition in an economic downturn starts to spend less, so that means you can actually spend less but still maintain your share of voice in the marketplace.”
The second takeaway is that right now is a particularly good time to advertise.
In the 2008 recession, there were many brands, like Walmart and T-Mobile, that were able to catapult their business because they leaned into the downturn and in many cases doubled down. Many of these success stories put a particular focus on brand building.
“What we’ve seen since the start of COVID-19 is a lot of DTC and challenger brands are doing the same thing,” DeLauro says. “They’re looking at this as an opportunity to go out and build their brand and try to take share in those marketplaces.”
Nerdwallet, Tommy John, and Grubhub are three examples of brands using the current downturn as a way to gain brand awareness. Direct-to-consumer brands, in particular have increased their spend in television, specifically, because they have some of the best data and analytics in the industry, and TV is what is giving them the clearest results.
“I think that’s something that legacy brands should really be aware of and consider if they’re thinking about pulling back their spend,” DeLauro says.
]]>“They reflect what the current state of television is, which is full funnel, all the time,” Cunningham told Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat hosted by Horizon Media in New York City. Cunningham says these brands’ TV ad spend has surged to amount to $4 billion, and that their interest in television signifies its newfound status as a performance marketing channel. Used to call-to-action campaigns on Facebook and Google, DTC brands are now looking to TV to do two things at once: build brand awareness and affinity, and drive conversions while gathering audience insights.
That capability didn’t happen overnight. Cunningham says addressable TV is something that marketers were told about for a “better part of a decade” before it became reality. The rise of data stack and tech stack equipped platforms like Facebook and Google – platforms that lack the premium content of TV – lit a fire under the networks, which had the content but not the data or tech capabilities.
“Another race, essentially was on,” says Cunningham, adding that the arrival at addressable is the outcome of networks’ and marketers’ investment in first-party data, as well as the ability to put that data into action. Now, companies can mesh data with the content that drives companies to spend with TV distributors in the first place. “I’m not saying race over, race won, but race well run to say for the marketer, I’m going to run as hard as humanly possible so I can mesh this data with the content as a TV company. That meshing together gets them to a place where they don’t have to decide between content, context and tech. They get it all.”
As marketers adjust to new capabilities of addressable, and look for results, Cunningham says the most important thing to do is to give it time. While there will be short-term results, the real value comes in the long play.
“The first question marketers should ask is how long should I do this. The answer is quarter, after quarter, for a couple of years, because you need to understand the full-funnel implications of what you’re doing,” says Cunningham.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>As the average total duration of ads on US TV has climbed to 22 minutes per hour, subscription, ad-free video services have risen in popularity.
That is prompting a recalibration, with many networks committing to air fewer or shorter ads.
But, for the leader of an umbrella group representing premium video and TV publishers, ad load is a symptom of one thing – advertising’s effectiveness.
“Someone can … say something’s too much or too little. But the advertisers themselves, they’re the ones who want to continue to use this medium in all its forms because very simply it works,” says Sean Cunningham, CEO of VAB, in this video interview.
“The reason that there is the multiplicity of ads out there is because of the fact that we have ever more advertisers who want the inventory, and they want the inventory because they’ve got the data and the analytics that say that there’s a bold line between television advertising in all its forms and the outcomes they’re looking for.”
Cunningham’s VAB was formed in 2015 out of the old Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB) and represents national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPDs, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business.
He says viewers and publishers are actually involved in a consensual relationship thanks to advertising.
“There is an understanding essentially that world-class content comes with an ad contract,” Cunningham says. “What we’re seeing is that we are putting ever more relevant ads with ever more relevant stimuli in front of properly identified consumers who are taking actions against them.”
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
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