The upfront ad sales season is the time of year when programmers traditionally tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.<\/p>\n

But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.<\/p>\n

Spiegel agrees that “the (TV) upfront has probably changed forever”.<\/p>\n

He imagines new advertising coming from higher-education e-learning providers, all kinds of subscription services and from fitness operators launching digital content strategies.<\/p>\n

The confluence of circumstances could be good news for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, which have already been advertising on TV over the last couple of years but which could use the opportunity of cheaper inventory to make a bigger impression.<\/p>\n

They are the kinds of marketers that are “data-driven”, Spiegel says: “Those types of marketers are the ones that therefore expect their media partners, their ad tech partners, or a combination of the two, to do a better job allowing micro-segmentation, to do a general better job allowing frequency of optimizations, to do dynamic creative messaging, and to do the types of stuff that really leads to higher marketing ROI.<\/p>\n

“Personalization is becoming ever more important. To enable those types of things, you needed a firm grasp on understanding individuals and understanding the households with various identity signals that are necessary to address the appropriate devices, in many cases meaning not relying on a cookie ID but relying other identity signals.”<\/p>\n