Screens and screamers: The best one-liners from The Future of TV Advertising Forum

News Analysis 2 Mar 2020 - 2 min read

Screens and screamers: The best one-liners from The Future of TV Advertising Forum

By Josh McDonnell - Senior Writer

L to R: Tubi's Tyler Fitch, Seven's Charlotte Valente, VMLY&R Paul Nagy and GroupM's Nic Lewis, The full-day event featured clients, agencies and owners, all weighing in on what lies ahead for the evolving TV sector.

Market Voice 3 min read

Retail media: Key lessons to avoid repeating programmatic ‘gold rush’ mistakes, hollowing out brand budgets

By Rory Heffernan - Chief Executive Officer, Atomic 212º | Partner Content

Retail media’s rise comes as marketers are being told to do even more with even less, says Atomic 212º Chief Executive Officer, Rory Heffernan, and puts brand budgets under further pressure.

Market Voice 4 min read

Airports are back bigger and better: why they are the next frontier for incredibly human brand connection

By Jemma Enright - General Manager, Airport, JCDecaux ANZ | Partner Content

In the next 5 years, brands will be reaching 85m passengers a year in the transformed terminals of Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth airports. That’s a massive opportunity to engage an emotionally charged audience in a context of curiosity and discovery, says JCDecaux’s Jemma Enright.

Market Voice 3 min read

The best relationships are personal – regional strategies should be too

By Phil Leyshon - Director of Digital, ACM | Partner Content

Mi3 sat down with ACM Director of Digital Phil Leyshon to discuss how first party data and enriched targeting is bringing brands closer to the regions – and notching upwards of 30 per cent growth.

Tags:

Here's the fast and furious version of this year's Future of TV Advertising Forum, which pulled 500-plus marketing, agency and media types on what next for TV, in all its forms. Take a tour of our curated selection of quotes for the time-poor on BVOD, overloaded adloads, the streaming invasion, VOZ, martech mistakes, pitching problems and misguided marketing mindsets.

"What is the second-largest streaming platform in Australia? Number one, of course, is Netflix. Looking at it you might say it's Stan but I'm going to say no, it's not. It's a hypothetical platform that doesn't yet exist...each BVOD platform has an average reach of 16% individually, but when combining those who watch two or more of those services you get a reach of 34%, meaning the FTA broadcasters are the second-biggest streaming platform in Australia [collectively]. Therein lies an opportunity for broadcasters."

Guy Bisson from Ampere Research shares some of the key insights around the world of streaming and where TV needs to find its footing in the space. Bisson also laid down the law on broadcasters taking on a "Hulu-like" model, adding that he expected them to do so in the next three years.

"If you want to know how to create a stampede [towards BVOD] rather than a trot, we need to tell clients to stop spending so much on YouTube. In some instances we are seeing 80% of video budgets going into the platform, that's absolutely bonkers. 80% is too much, so, stop."

Teleria Senior Vice President APAC Juliette Stead says, while still valuable, clients and agencies need to reconsider their excessive investment into YouTube and start looking at BVOD as an important part of the video buy.

“This product [VOZ], it’s not a funnel into any marketing proposition. It’s a flywheel. And that flywheel is about attract, engage and delight. We’ve attracted, we’re engaging, we need to delight. "

Seven's chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette on how he sees the upcoming launch of Virtual Australia fitting into the overall marketing mix.

“While we won’t oversell and over-promise, because it is a journey, the results are pretty amazing and we should, in Australia, be very, very proud of what we’ve achieved."

Nine's Chief Sales Officer Michael Stephenson shared Burnette's enthusiasm for VOZ and responded to claims that the product may have been "overhyped". The Nine sales boss joked at the same time that the industry "shouldn't undersell it".

"The client spends over $500m around the world and the Australian team’s contribution to that review was nine cells on one Excel spreadsheet of some unit costs. But we’re probably the third most important market for that client in the world."

Havas Media's chairman Mike Wilson dishes out an "extreme" but "correct" example of how global media pitches are overriding the important role markets like Australia play.

"Searching for the right thing to watch is becoming overwhelming. In the US it takes people an average of seven minutes to decide what to watch in the SVOD environment. By that time, my food has gone cold."

According to Christian Kurz, ViacomCBS senior vice-president global consumer insights, content remains king. Research conducted by the business suggests consumers don't define TV based off a screen, wire or transmission method anymore, they base it off the quality of the programming they see. Now they need the industry to make finding quality content easier for them.

"The very idea of captured audiences is very much like the concept of mild summers, it's in the past. It's not going to happen anymore. We're obsessed with the audience, we should be just as interested in creative that can hold their attention during ads."

Paul Nagy of VMLY&R provides the creative agency point of view on the future of TV ads. Nagy, naturally, says it's all about the creative: if premium content such as Apple TV's Morning Wars cant' hold his teenage daughter's attention and keep her from checking her phone, what luck does 'average' advertising have in the world of TV?

"There's a difference between what audiences will tell you what they watch and what they actually watch. Really understanding what content is going to engage them - not just capture their attention - is paramount."

Seven's new CMO Charlotte Valente told the crowd it is a marketer's role to focus all their attention on audience when it comes to TV. On the back-end, she acknowledged that better metrics are required to enable brands to continue to demonstrate TV's brand building attributes.

"The pureplay AVODs are more than happy to see the SVODs battle it out and spend billions of dollars creating the top 1% of content, because the rest of the 99% are happy to watch content that Netflix had locked up [in longstanding] deals. We continue to be that extra avenue for people to monetise content - and it's only looking better as the fight for SVOD continues to get bloodier in the next six months."

Ad-supported streaming service Tubi's VP of advertising partnerships, Tyler Fitch, on the approaching avalanche of AVOD, and blood in the snow for SVOD.

"If you at look at how clients work now, many have a multi-tiered approach to TV: sponsorships, brand integrations and traditional breaks. We speak a lot about this notion of brand coming back and at GroupM, we've seen a lot of people come into that space, because the content that is being created is so good."

GroupM chief investment officer, Nicola Lewis, on how the changing face of TV requires brands to cover all bases.

“Customers we are losing at Foxtel are the low-value ones that in the last five years, we probably shouldn’t have chased. The $26 basic package at Foxtel is not a great experience. I can tell you from a capital and income standpoint, it’s not an experience we want either."

Patrick Delany, Foxtel CEO, during his fireside chat about the future of the pay-TV business. The subscription TV boss went into all areas of the company, including its extensive content library, which he admits has become too crowded.

"If you start launching advertising product and inventory and shoving it down people's throats, you'll immediately lose those customers. And if like us and your product is paid for, then they'll never come back.

Foxtel director of advanced advertising, Nev Hasan, on creating new ad formats in the era of addressable TV.