1. Polling And The Brand Lift Conundrum
If there was one indisputable takeaway from this week’s U.S. elections, it is that polling, in its current state, is terminally broken.
Polls from all sources in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races had the candidates in close striking distance of each other and yet the final results were nowhere near close, with both Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger each winning by 14 points.
This is notable in that there was no last-minute scandal that might have sent voters into the arms of the two Democrats, no smoking gun that dramatically changed the race.
While candidates have, of course, defied the odds in previous elections, the size of the gap this time was magnitudes greater than in prior election years, indicating that our current polling methodology is in massive need of a rehaul.
Why It Matters
Political polling uses the same techniques and methodologies as consumer polling, brand lift surveys in particular.
As television has become both more measurable and more fragmented, these brand lift surveys have become increasingly important for advertisers who want to continue to use TV to “brand build”—to increase or maintain awareness levels and to boost the brand’s impression in the minds of consumers.
If these surveys prove to be faulty and thus ultimately useless, that greatly impacts advertisers desire to use TV as their primary branding vehicle.
Which brings us to how do we actually fix the problem.
The reason it is broken is pretty easy to determine: traditional methods of polling no longer work.
- Few people under 50 have land lines anymore.
- Many people do not answer calls or texts from unknown numbers and/or they have them set to automatically go to spam
- Many avoid pollsters as they are convinced they are scammers trying to find out passwords and other private information. Or government workers trying to determine who voted against them. (Conspiracy theorism runs deep.)
- As a result, response rates for phone surveys have plummeted from over 35% in the 1990s to single digits today (often 1-2%).
- Given the state of phone surveys, there is considerable skepticism around who is actually responding to pollsters and what their motivation is, with the key takeaway being that they are not a representative sample.
To remedy this, pollsters have turned to techniques like weighting and modeling, which are exactly what they sound like.
If, for instance, they know that seniors are far more likely to respond to polls, but only 20% of the electorate are over 65, then they will weight the responses to take that into account.
Modeling—technically known as Multilevel Regression and Poststratification or MRP is a more sophisticated model where they take the people they did talk to and project their responses onto similar demographics in the population at large.
So if, say, they spoke to 15 female factory workers aged 25-34 and 80% of them support Candidate X, the model uses that data, along with other factors, to help estimate how that candidate will do with the entire population of female factory workers aged 25-34.
It’s a clever system but it only works until it doesn’t—meaning people don’t always act the way you’d expect, even within similar groups, which is why MRP modeling can also be wildly off.
This same process more or less defines how consumer studies are conducted as well.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are an advertiser, publisher or ad agency, understand that while measuring quantifiable data is hard, measuring probabilistic data is even harder and so make sure that you have the right partners in place.
You will need TV, with its sight, sound and motion, to help you do basic brand building.
Yes, it can be a great performance vehicle, and yes, it’s a lot easier to prove that “we ran this ad for our widgets with a QR code and X% of people visited our site and Y% bought a new widget”.
But never forget that “X% of people saw our ad, laughed, and now have a much better opinion of our widgets than they did three months ago” is a much more valuable use of your TV ad spend.
Provided, of course, you measure it correctly.
2. Disney Gets Bundled Down By YouTube
00s clothing and music are big with Alphas these days and so why shouldn’t another 00s greatest hit, carriage disputes, make a comeback too?
Or at least that’s what it’s been feeling like as Disney and YouTube go at it and sports fans suffer.
For those of you who’ve tuned out of the TV bubble, Disney wants YouTube TV to pay more money for its networks, YouTube says they’re not worth it and Disney’s just trying to squeeze them because ESPN.
And now people who thought they were clever for ditching Comcast for a virtual MVPD like YouTube TV are wishing they’d stuck around a little longer.
Why It Matters
So much to unpack here.
To begin with, there is the basic nature of the bundle.
You see, in olden times, media companies wanted to have as many networks as possible on a cable system because that made it more likely that someone would see an ad on one of those networks. So if there were eight MTVs that made it more likely that someone would be watching an MTV network than if there were only one.
Or at least that is how the theory went.
Then there was sports.
Rights to Big Four games were expensive AF.
But no matter. That cost could be passed on to the MVPDs, who needed to have sports in order to lure customers away from free broadcast TV.
No matter for the MVPDs either. They’d just pass the cost on to consumers.
To ensure that this inglorious circle remained unbroken, the media companies insisted that the MVPDs include their pricey sports-heavy networks in the basic bundle.
Once this happened, the media companies would claim that “the only reason you have all those subs is because they want to watch sports on our networks. So pay up bitches!”
This worked until it didn’t and every so often an MVPD would rebel and there would be a carriage dispute and the networks would go black, thus generating massive news coverage and multiple man-in-the-streets interviews on the evening news.
Because that was what people did in those pre-TikTok days—watched the evening news.
Charlie Ergun, Dish’s CEO, was notorious for carriage disputing with the various media companies and famously kept HBO off of Dish for something like three years.
But most got settled much sooner, because in the days when people’s lives revolved around TV, a carriage dispute was on par with a Katrina-level natural disaster.
So there was that.
People also hated their cable companies back then.
Like hated them the way Luigi Mangione hated insurance companies.
To wit, #ComcastSucks was one of early days Twitter’s first popular hashtag.
It was easy to understand why—cable companies locked people into expensive and byzantine multiyear contracts, contracts that were all but impossible to get out of. If you could even find the phone number to call to get out of them. (Google it—it was a thing back in those halcyon Von Dutch trucker hat days.)
The cable companies have, to their credit, done a remarkable job of reviving consumer trust over the past two decades and so consumers no longer automatically take the media companies side—a factor they frequently relied on as a negotiating tactic. (“We’ve got sports and everyone hates you!”)
Only nobody hates YouTube.
I mean sure, some older people and MAHA moms and all that, but generally people feel it’s a force for good.
And if you have YouTube TV chances are you are something of a fan.
Meaning that more people are on Team YouTube than on Team Disney.
Especially now that they’ve learned, via L’Affaire Kimmel, that the House of Mouse is not always on the side of good.
So there’s that too and whisperings that maybe Disney is doing this to drive people to Hulu Live TV, its rival vMVPD.
Which is unlikely, but we live in a time where far wilder conspiracy theories have found sizable audiences, so it’s definitely a factor.
Then there’s sports, which, if you’re doing linear TV, is a huge cudgel.
Because as we devolve further into the age of Feudal Media, sports is still the only way for advertisers to reach millions of people all at the same time.
It’s also the only way to reach what we’ve been calling the “15 Million Merits” audience—that affluent, educated 10% or so of the population who have insulated themselves from ads.
They subscribe to the ad-free tier of every streaming service. Use ad-blockers on their browsers and ignore billboards on the highway. (Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the picture.)
There is only one place they see ads, and that is live sports.
Which, to be fair, is starting to become much less monolithic as the Big Four see their audiences getting grayer and grayer as younger fans watch other sports, women’s sports and lots of highlight reels online.
But is still a thing.
So YouTube needs sports because that’s really the only reason most people are subscribing to a vMVPD. And Disney knows that.
This is where we stand as of today, the rivals staring at each other across the corpse strewn no man’s land between trenches, waiting to see who blinks first.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are Disney remember that once these things last longer than a week or two people get really pissed off and you’re coming up on that deadline.
As I told Business Insider, once you get to the “month” mark, it looks really bad. And then there’s Thanksgiving which is just 20 days away.
So maybe it’s time to give a little.
Especially because you-know-who could issue a “Truth” about it and that’s unlikely to work out well for you.
If you’re YouTube, remember that brand loyalty is fleeting, that installing the Hulu app is easy and that even though you seem to have the descamisados on your side, loyalty is fleeting.
Especially if it means missing Thanksgiving football.
If you are a fan, be patient.
I suspect this will get settled sooner than later and you’ll be able to slip into a tryptophan-fueled sleep, lulled by the sounds of ESPN’s announcing team.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.