Audience Fragmentation and Media Consolidation Are Hurting Most Clients

Typical media agencies are ill suited for getting client’s real value from media buys. Media audiences are fragmenting at an increasing rate. There are very few opportunities in mass media to reach large audiences, yet most brands need reach to drive new buyers to their brand. Buyers at large agencies are siloed into “centers of excellence”, meaning some buyers only buy Cable, some only buy Prime, some only buy Syndication, etc. While this might give them some knowledge of a media market there’s an entire ecosystem occurring over their heads and they know nothing of it. It comes from media company consolidation. And only savvy, de-siloed media agencies can capitalize on it.

Disney is a large media company. The image below includes many of their media properties. They operate in Network, cable and local TV, radio, online, print and on-site. They also have partial ownership in Hulu and other properties.

Now think about how companies like CBS own TV, online, radio, outdoor properties. Every major media company owns multiple properties, and I’m not just talking about online extensions. They own different brands in different media.

How are today’s large over-siloed media agencies structured to get clients an advantage? Media buying is set up to favor the sellers in every way these days. How else can you explain audience CPM’s increasing while individual media property audiences are shrinking? One reason is that media agencies don’t negotiate price. They negotiate increases.

There’s a better way. Smaller media agencies are better suited to deal with today’s complex media market. Senior management who establish the strategies stay close to the end product. They identify media companies and deploy programs regardless of which department should get which budget. There are fewer fiefdoms to feed and fewer “centers of power” fighting for survival internally.

Can I Be Upfront With You?

This week is the annual parade of network TV presentations and parties where the networks pre-screen their September TV schedules for the marketing and advertising community. As important as what their upcoming content may be it also signifies the beginning of one of the oddest behaviors from otherwise intelligent people; investing billions of dollars in schedules before marketing plans are developed.

Whose idea was this anyway? It’s no secret that this process favors the sellers more than the buyers for a number of reasons.

1)   Let’s start with the macro-economic look; creating demand for a diminishing supply of “goods” only leads to pricing increases. Think about this, who else can take a diminishing commodity—in this case TV GRP’s—and actually drive up the pricing? If TV rating points are decreasing why are CPM’s increasing? Because marketers are addicted to TV. Because many brand managers are evaluated on how well the brand does under their tenure vs. the prior period year ago. If a brand purchased 75 TV GRP’s same week last year they better have a good reason to not buy 75 GRP’s this year. So assuming they needed 25 units last year to achieve 75 GRP’s they need to buy more units this year. Even one more unit creates more demand because everyone needs to buy more units—and there is no incentive for the networks to add more commercial units. More demand for a diminishing supply means unit price increases.

2)   Agencies don’t negotiate pricing of units, they negotiate price increases. Ask any TV buyer what their thoughts are for the upcoming market and they will talk about how much of an increase there will be. What kind of market is framed from the beginning this way? One that is designed to favor the seller.

3)   Sellers walk away from this process with a certain amount of guaranteed sold inventory, even if every marketer exercises their options more than half their inventory for the year is committed to. Why does this hurt marketers? Because they cannot allocate resources to other marketing channels. Should a brand’s budget be cut how committed is the budget to radio? To digital? To print? To OOH? These media are the ones to get cut when budgets are reduced because the sellers don’t have a marketplace working to their advantage.

4)   It breeds mediocrity in programming and risk taking by marketers. Aside from a few great shows what incentive does a TV network have to create 100% truly groundbreaking programming? They are better off feeding the status quo. Marketers are forced to decide between promising mediocre, estimable results than pushing for innovation.

Why am I bothering. Nothing will change. Marketers will get caught up in the frenzy and this year’s upfront will take in over $9 billion dollars.