A Boon For Hulugans, Streamers and Cord Cutters

Today’s content is written by Alexa Paradis

Hulu has always been a leading force in the streaming age, differentiating itself from Netflix by offering current seasons of network shows in addition to their vast library of shows and movies. This made them the perfect match for cord-cutters who wanted immediate access to new episodes of their favorite shows. On May 3 during their 2017 Upfront, Hulu announced that they were now offering a live TV subscription that includes over 50 channels to start that will grow over the current year. The current channel offerings include all 4 Broadcast networks, all major sports networks, 5 children’s networks along with the Scripps channels just to name a few. This package will not replace their normal streaming subscriptions but instead be an add-on for customers that will cost $40 per month and also come with the ability to stream on multiple screens at once, quite less then the average cable bill. “Hulu can now be a viewer’s primary source of television,” said Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins. “It’s a natural extension of our business, and an exciting new chapter for Hulu.” As a millennial that cut the cord once I moved out of my parents’ house, I would definitely consider adding this onto my normal Hulu subscription especially if it means I can be watching the new episode of Scandal while my boyfriend watches the Yankee game in the other room.

For advertisers this means even more inventory on Hulu, in addition to their 32 million viewers who opt for ad-supported content advertisers now have access to the standard 2 minutes of local breaks per hour on cable networks. Also announced was a new deal with Nielsen, Hulu said advertisers will have access to Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) across connected-TV devices starting in the fall of 2017, to provide a validated measurement solution across screens. Another amazing new feature for advertisers is the launch of T-commerce interactive ads in partnership with BrightLine that will let subscribers purchase movie tickets through their connected TVs. The on-screen purchasing capabilities will expand to other categories like retail and quick-serve restaurants in 2018.

Aside from the exciting announcement of the live TV subscription Hulu touted their extensive release schedule of original programing for this year with all of their biggest stars stepping on stage to share their excitement. Stars of the instant hit “The Handmaid’s Tail” announced that not only did they have the most streamed series premiere on the platform out of original and acquired series but they have already been green lit for a second season. Other exciting original series announced were Marvels “Runaway Teens”, Mars mission drama “The First” from House of Cards creator Beau Willimon, Seth Rogen’s project “Future Man”, Sarah Silverman’s political comedy series “America, I love You”, “The Looming Tower” which will star Alec Baldwin along with the series finale of “The Mindy Project”.

A powerful moment took place when Mindy Kaling took the stage for her last upfront and thanked Hulu for being a place that all types of women can be showcased and celebrated, which is not something you can find in many types of entertainment today. This certainly sets Hulu apart from their traditional network counterparts as a way to connect with Millennials who place a high value on inclusivity of all types of characters, especially female ones.

This year’s upfront showed that Hulu is remaining vigilant in their quest to be streamers go-to service and advertisers go-to platform to reach a diverse and highly engaged audience. The company shows no signs of slowing down their innovation either.

Private Equity

Over the last few weeks there has been much reported about problems with automated digital buying, whether it’s Facebook’s misreporting of metrics, YouTube ads running within controversial videos or the latest that Header Bidding isn’t fixing brand safety problems. This problem has major implications on the future of the business of digital publishing.

Over the last few years open market real time bidding has taken off, driven primarily by agencies who are looking to arbitrage pricing to improve their overall margins. They create imaginary companies, agency trading desks, which simply sell inventory to themselves to sell to their clients at significantly higher CPMs than they paid. Agencies are looking for low price inventory that provides the highest margin. Clients aren’t looking deeply enough at site lists and sources of clicks to see how much bad traffic and click fraud is occurring. There’s just too much to wade through to find out.

This creates a need for publishers to create more impressions to sell through low quality and low cost content. Publishers created click bait and fraudulent traffic to make up for the “race to the bottom” pricing being offered by buyers. Sites like Buzzfeed, Diply, Answers, and Mashable use social media to generate traffic to content of absolutely no consequence;  “listicles” that require multiple clicks to complete. Each click results in a fresh set of ads being loaded and charged to advertisers. The industry went too far and now it is time to return to more reasonable practices.

As a buyer who embraces programmatic buying of digital advertising for many clients I see the value in using data to better select which ad impressions to bid on based on our clients’ needs. I counsel my clients not to use programmatic just to save money, but to use it to minimize waste that comes from buying “media space” instead of “audiences”.

Header bidding will help in allowing publishers to evaluate all bids simultaneously, thereby selling the impression to the highest bidder but there is little incentive for them to minimize the click bait approach that leads to the wormhole. The best outcome for all parties is for faster adoption of private marketplace (PMP) deals that can be executed programmatically. There is more transactional transparency for all parties. Publishers can better control who advertises on their pages and marketers can have better control of brand safety and content they approve of.

Accept the higher CPM that PMP’s require because you’ll be getting the same results or better on effectiveness. Don’t let low CPMs be the barometer for your digital media buy.

 

When Walking Away Is The Right Decision

I hate walking away from prospective business, but a recent situation made me realize that sometimes that is the best outcome. A few months ago I received an inquiry from someone purported to be a consultant who was given our name through a mutual business friend. She was looking to bring in a new media agency for a small HBC company. The brief she sent focused on two objectives; reduce the agency fee and improve the media efficiency (she meant to say lower the CPM because media efficiency and media cost are not the same thing).

I scheduled a conference call with her and one of my key people, while on vacation, to discuss the project and see if it made sense for us to participate. We opted to go forward and had an in-person meeting with the consultant the following week. As she briefed us it became clear that she was asking for spec work, a fully fleshed out media plan—read my prior post on this subject here http://wp.me/p2edMw-2s

There is a certain amount of spec work I am willing to do in a new business pitch. Anything more than that I ask to be paid for. In this case I asked for a “go-away” fee on the work if they did not hire us. It’s an interesting approach in that often times the work is good enough that it forces the prospect to hire us or pay two agencies. The problem here is that we wanted a lot more than the prospect was willing to pay. They did not put the same value on our work as we did. Our ask was 10X what they were willing to pay.

We settled on an intermediate number, but I insisted that it be only if the client agreed to our ongoing fee structure. It made no sense for us to continue if the client wasn’t intending on paying us the compensation rates we wanted. The consultant danced around the commitment and kept insisting that we needed to do the spec work and the fees would work out. Red flag number 1.

Red flag number 2: the consultant asked us to break out our fees for planning and buying separately because she wanted to manage some of the buying herself. Apparently she had a relationship in the :10 TV unit space and wanted to be more than the consultant. She was going to push for the agency that allowed her to maintain this position—and likely the one who planned the most :10’s.

It was then that we decided that we did not want to pursue the assignment because there would be a lot of spec work, which even if they did not hire us, would benefit the consultant more than the client or us.

The Battle Over The Pipeline

No, not the Keystone Pipeline, but the pipeline delivering content into US homes. Yesterday the FCC proposed a framework (whatever that means) for providing innovators, app developers and device manufacturers the information they need to develop new technologies. A link to the FCC’s statement on this is here: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2016/db0127/DOC-337449A1.pdf

So who is for and who is against?

No surprise, cable companies are against this because it does something they hate most, it creates competition for accessing TV programming. It also removes an important revenue stream—renting boxes to subscribers, generating billions to their coffers.

Basically everyone else in the world supports this. Imagine people having their own boxes (think Roku, AppleTV, Google Fiber) and deciding what programming they want through their cable company and what programming they want direct.

Another benefit for consumers will be the ease to transition from Cable TV to SVOD to YouTube, etc on your TV monitor. My favorite part might be a single remote instead of three. The question that remains is whether this will eventually reduce costs or increase costs. People are willing to pay for multiple services and convenience, so it could go either way.

Video content providers will see a boon and direct access to subscribers without having to be held captive to cable company’s demands and idiosyncrasies. With millions of options for video content people will curate their own personal networks. We will likely see even more short-form content with fewer ads as either pre-roll or in-stream with more real time ad insertion and addressability.

In the words of the French poet Paul Valery, “The future isn’t what it used to be”.

The Dark Side of Programmatic Buying

Programmatic digital can be dicey when it comes to getting what you paid for and you should be concerned about fraud, bots, safety, and viewability issues that result in bad outcomes.

A few months ago a prospective client asked me to evaluate a small programmatic buy her agency had executed for her with one DSP. The agency thought the buy was great, given that they drove a CTR of .48%, higher than most campaigns with a CPM of $1.40. On the surface I would agree.

That is, until I looked at the source of clicks report. This was a small enough campaign, just under 10,000 clicks, that a simple scan of the source of the clicks made me question the real value of the campaign. Many of the URL’s were from out of the US (Belgium, Brazil, Malaysia to name a few) but his was supposed to be a US campaign. Many were from sites that I could not load if I tried. Many seemed to be legitimate sites, but the visits were very low quality and very brief. The average session time for clicks from this DSP was 1/3^rd to 1/4^th the next lowest referrer. Average page views were even lower.

I sent the source of clicks list to a third party fraud and safety expert for their opinion. About 50% of the clicks were “High Risk” for fraud and another 5% were “Suspect”.

So if this is true, the client’s CPC for real clicks just doubled, at a minimum. Since I knew which DSP was used I asked them for their opinion on the third party auditor’s findings. I was shocked at the response from the DSP salesperson; “we take brand safety very seriously and we’re more than happy to deliver on any parameters mandated.  Normally, during campaign negotiations we need to know in advance if a campaign is being measured by a third party and we’ll set up with daily reporting so that we can optimize out of those placements, sites, creative, and or content driving fraud.” 

Let me translate this for you. He said that if they knew we were going to look at a third party safety audit that they would not have delivered those impressions. Want to know what was worse? The CEO of the DSP echoed the same sentiments when I raised the issue up the line.

Fraud and bot clicks are going to happen. Clients and their partners who focus exclusively on getting the lowest CPM or CPC will find that they are actually paying more than they think for real inventory. Use a third party verification service for your campaigns, even if it is just to keep the people you’re giving money to honest.

For more info go to http://www.ocdmedia.com

Is Your Marketing An Investment Or A Cost?

Never underestimate the importance of goal setting and strategy in media. While smart media buying will save you money, smart media strategy will make you money. Without a well thought out media plan you are not getting the most from your budget because you have not determined what you should buy and what you should not. While what you buy may be priced well relative to other options, buying the wrong media is wasteful no matter what the price is. And all too often advertisers and their agencies let buying lead the media process or are missing the connection between the plan strategy and the buy.

Would you use an investment strategy of buying only stocks that are less than $10 per share? And would you use the broker who charges the least per transaction because all he has to do is tell you how much of a given stock is available when you are ready to buy? Or does this sound crazy to you? It is crazy. But what’s crazier is that some companies handle their largest investment, advertising media, in this manner.

This approach is designed to limit your costs, but what you may not know is it also limits your return. Successful media buying, much like having success in the stock market, depends on good research and good timing because the basis of both is supply and demand. The biggest difference is that media buying is more negotiable than the stock market, an extra level of complexity that ultimately determines how much you will pay for your ad time/space.

And negotiating is something large media buying agencies on the whole don’t do as well as their smaller sized competitors. “How can this be?” you ask. “My agency buys gazillions of dollars of ad time, they have to get better prices than the agencies who buy less. It’s simple math. You buy more you get a better price.” Remember Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory in that classic “I Love Lucy” episode? That is what being a media buyer in a mega-media agency is like. You don’t have time to “wrap” the schedule properly because you have three more buys to get on the air that day.

Negotiating is about give and take, a certain back and forth. If you’re using one of these big guys chances are you’re not getting the best price because the buyer cares more about getting four buys on the air, and less about buying the right inventory. It’s easier for them to only buy the lowest priced stuff because they don’t have to worry about value. But you should because your media buy is your investment in your brand like your stock portfolio is your investment in your retirement, not an expense on your P&L.

Smart media planning let’s you know which media does and does not make sense for your efforts. It helps tell you which media to stay away from. Buying the wrong media because it’s cheap is as wasteful as buying premium priced media that isn’t right for you. Neither one will produce results.

An approach that recognizes the importance of strategy means targeting the right people at the right time, yielding a smarter use of your marketing resources. Make it easier for a buyer to buy effectively because they know the difference between price and value.

The Model Isn’t Broken. It’s Fixed.

Sony, VW, P&G, J&J, Bacardi, SC Johnson, Visa, 21^st Century Fox, L’Oreal, Coca Cola, BMW, BASF. What do all these companies have in common? They all have placed their media business in review, or recently completed a review. Their incumbent media agencies; the usual suspects—OMD, Zenith, UM, Mediacom, Vizeum, Carat, Starcom/MediaVest. The agencies involved in the review; the usual suspects.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

I’ve heard and read that some people believe that industry change (content, integration, analytics) is driving this rash of reviews. If so, why are the same agencies that some clients are dissatisfied with all of a sudden appealing to others? Why would OMD be a good repository for Bacardi, which they recently won, when current clients J&J and Visa have put their accounts in review? Is it because what is shown in new business pitches is not what is used on a daily basis? I witnessed much of this when I was at Initiative, albeit a dozen years ago. The people who work on client business think many of the tools and sexy stuff shown in new business pitches is just that, only shown in new business pitches. It’s not practical for everyday use because the planners have too many boxes of GRP’s to fill in. They do not have the time to solve real business problems.

So what is the value proposition of these mega-media agencies? It certainly isn’t buying leverage because smaller agencies can match the big guys on media pricing—and often beat them. The big guys speak of relationships with the media companies, but the media companies are putting more and more inventory up for sale in the open market, using exchanges to eliminate the human aspect of transactions that is rife with inefficiencies.

Others suggest that the reviews are procurement driven, which explains why only the usual list of invitees are participating. These big agencies hate losing business and they’ll promise everything to win. They have a beast to feed to perpetuate their own myth and they believe their own BS.

You don’t have to. If you want the same-old solutions join in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. If you want real change you really have to want to change.

Repercussions

The fallout from Jon Mandel’s statement at the ANA about Agency kickbacks has led to a number of anonymous executives admitting it has happened under their watch and some even confessed to participating themselves. Now, this doesn’t mean that these individuals received kickbacks, but that they allowed their agency/media company to take or give money for a media buy. Initially I thought Jon Mandel was overstating a problem, but apparently it is more prevalent than we could imagine. This is certainly more significant than an agency taking the 2% cash/pre-payment discount–which is still sometimes offered–and not offering the money back to the client.

In my last blog I focused on the kickbacks that were occurring out in the open via mega holding company specialty shops. Read that blog for background. So to go into more detail, here’s how the mechanics would work in two scenarios:

• Moving buys through a barter division. To simplify things, media companies sometimes want to take clients on a trip or schedule a sales meeting in a nice venue away from the office. Rather than pay cash for these trips the media company will offer future access to media inventory at a reduced price or for free to a barter agency. This is easier than going to management and asking them to pay out-of-pocket, but the media company offers value of inventory that is higher than the cost of the trip. The media company can be more lavish and less cost-conscious, especially when it comes to taking clients on a trip. The barter agency sells the inventory either internally or externally at closer to market pricing and makes a significant profit. The barter division of the mega agency holding company tries to move this inventory internally first, where they can ask for equivalent market pricing. If they sell it externally it needs to be sold at below market pricing. Suddenly a 2% commission on national Cable TV becomes 25% or more–I’m being kind. Remember, some of this inventory can be accessed for free. Barter division provides kickback to media agency to ensure the deal goes through.

• Non-disclosed media buying. Marketers less familiar with the agency process or infrastructure might be led to believe that their media buying is falling under the master contract with a creative agency when, in fact, it does not. The media agency adds their commissions into the media prices they quote, taking a high commission rate. The creative agency keeps all of their fees, not having to pay for media service while completely offloading the labor. Sometimes they even get a kickback above and beyond their fee.

Both of these scenarios would pass muster on an audit because the audit only goes one transaction deep. The auditors are not examining every transaction nor do they know there are secondary transactions. The kickback would always be treated as a separate transaction, not discounts on invoices.

The more you know, the more you don’t want to know.

A Matter of Efficiency

If you ask any media planner or buyer what the term efficiency means they will tell you that it is the way to determine relative value of different media and is usually defined as the cost per thousand impressions, CPM, of the media vehicle or buy. This results in their decisions on which media to buy being made strictly on costs.

That definition is dead wrong and leads to overemphasis on a surrogate measurement that may not correlate with sales results. Something is efficient if it is capable of producing the desired results without wasting materials, time, or energy. Can the vehicle deliver sales at a lower cost than other options? There is a cost/benefit perspective inherent in that definition. Nowhere in this description is there any indication that trying to get as many people as possible to see your efforts compared to other choices is the goal.

Making decisions based exclusively on audience cost of a media vehicle can waste tremendous resources. One of the sayings I’m known for is that the cheapest media is the most expensive media you might buy if it does not work.

Today we have so many tools at our disposal to apply metrics other than CPM to define efficiency. We also have ways to insert intermediate steps in the purchase consideration path to measure whether we are on the right track.

Are your media buyers looking at data other than audience delivery to track your progress? Are they looking at your Google Analytics data? Are they making adjustments based on how well their buy is driving traffic? Even if your ultimate goal is sales at retail there are intermediate steps that can be taken to identify what is working and what is not.

The secret is predicting in the planning stage what the potential return on each vehicle will be based on syndicated data, prior transactional data, behavioral modeling, etc. During the execution stage, make sure you align an inbound intermediate mechanism for tracking. You can use unique landing pages or promo codes, statistical modeling on web traffic, coupon downloads, social media actions or good old fashioned phone calls. A holistic look at this activity can prove helpful in making the proper optimizations to your campaign. Now that’s efficiency.