1. TV Should Be Cheering On Big Tech’s Breakup
A Federal Court judge ruled this week that Google was operating an illegal ad tech monopoly. While Google will most certainly appeal, it is all part of an ongoing effort by the Trump Administration to finish up what the Biden Administration started, something people of all political stripes have been urging for years: a break-up of Big Tech using antimonopoly regulations.
It is, from a political perspective, a wise move, as Americans traditionally have zero love for big companies in general, big tech companies with monopolies in particular, and so such moves are bound to be popular with large segments of the voting population.
Especially that portion that works in the television industry.
You, dear readers, should be absolutely thrilled.
Why It Matters
We can spend hours debating whether YouTube is actually TV or whether anyone under the age of 70 actually uses Facebook. But the reality is that for advertisers, both Alphabet and Meta have more or less complete control over their lanes.
There are no other competitors.
That means that both companies get to set the rules around everything, including measurement, transparency and pricing for their respective products and advertisers need to go along with it.
Because if you are Alphabet or Meta, you are largely competing on category.
Does someone want to buy social video? Do they want to buy search? Social media?
That’s it—once they’ve said yes, they don’t really have any other choices. Compare that to television, where there’s a seemingly endless array of both vendors and processes with which a willing advertiser can buy TV.
It’s as if Alphabet and Meta were China and the US, and television was Europe, only without the EU.
27 different markets, each competing against the other for buyers who want “Europe” but have nowhere to go to get all of it.
Break up Alphabet and Meta however, and all sorts of options open up.
An easy example of how this is playing out is the TV industry’s attempt to woo small and medium businesses away from Facebook’s very successful self-serve business.
On the surface, it’s a clever plan: Facebook usage is way down in the US, TV ads make even small advertisers feel “big time” and the one big roadblock—the cost of creating a TV commercial, has been ameliorated by AI. Meaning small local advertisers can use the targeting powers of CTV to put big beautiful commercials in front of the very consumers who might buy from them.
One small problem though. Say I am Wolk’s Widget Workshop and I like the idea of having my own TV commercial. Great. But who do I buy it from? Amazon? Paramount? My local TV station? Someone else? And if I only buy from two or three of those vendors, am I really getting the coverage I’m after?
Versus Facebook, where pretty much the entire adult population of the United States has a Facebook account. (Regardless of how infrequently they use it.)
The same scenario plays out with YouTube—you want social video? Well unless you are going for a specific niche audience, Vimeo alone is not going to cut it.
Which is why the television industry should be rooting very hard for the Justice Department to prevail in its efforts to break Alphabet and Meta into more bite-size pieces.
What You Need To About It
You know what I am going to say here: if you are the television industry, you need to start cooperating with each other and working to make it easier for both advertisers and consumers. To stop clinging to the ridiculous fantasy that you will be the only one who “wins” while all your competitors are “losers.”
Because here is the deal: it is highly likely that even a broken-up Alphabet or Meta will not be anywhere near as dysfunctional as the TV industry is today. That the resulting entities will agree to their own version of the EU, making it easier to buy and sell advertising across all platforms.
And you’ll still be a squabbling sack of pugilistic platforms, each one seemingly intent on making the entire process of planning and buying across platforms as arduous and onerous as possible.
So I will once again leave you with the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin: We must all hang together, or assuredly, we will all hang separately.
Take them to heart.
2. Advertising Is Getting Emotional On Us
Talk to anyone about TV, TV advertising in particular, and they will tell you that the ability to create emotional resonance is the medium’s main advantage.
People remember TV commercials they saw 20 years ago, but are hard-pressed to remember a banner ad they saw 20 minutes ago.
So it’s not surprising that we’re starting to see a lot of focus on quantifying and measuring emotion in TV commercials these days.
LG Ad Solutions just announced a partnership with Zenapse, a company that uses “LEMs”—Large Emotion Models to understand both the emotions behind the content and the viewer’s emotional state, in order to help brands find the right audience for their ads.
Wurl’s Brand Discovery platform utilizes a taxonomy based on the noted psychologist Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion to identify emotions in content in order to help brands place ads based on the emotional context of the scene prior to the ad break.
And Mediaprobe, a much buzzed-about Portuguese company, has developed a technology called GSR (galvanic skin response) that uses sensors to determine the level of emotional engagement viewers have with a specific piece of content. This is then used to create an Emotional Impact Score (EIS) that buyers and sellers can rely on to determine the value of ad impressions.
And those are but three of the more high-profile examples.
Why It Matters
As advertisers chase after consumers who are increasingly hard to find, they are constantly on the lookout for ways to make more effective use of their budgets.
Digital style demographic targeting is falling out of favor for a number of reasons: it does not take group viewing into account, it is often based on outdated data sets (even first party data sets can be inaccurate), it raises a host of privacy issues and, on television, the parameters brands use are often too narrow to deliver the sort of broad reach they are looking for.
That’s led to a renewal of interest in contextual targeting—placing ads based on the context of the programming the ads are running on. Within the greater contextual bucket, emotion is having a heyday, and, I would argue, rightly so.
TV has the ability to inspire emotions in a way that other media do not. Some of it is due to the sheer size of the screen, but most of it is due to the interplay of sight, sound and motion.
“Emotion” can run the full gamut, everything from the elation felt when your team comes back from a 14 point deficit late in the second half to the sadness you feel when your favorite character is killed off in a gunfight she had nothing to do with.
Just to name two recent examples.
By focusing on emotion, advertisers can take advantage of everything television has to offer, aligning their messaging with content that allows them to best take advantage of their unique narrative and brand image.
Granted this will be simpler for some brands than others—a sports car brand stirs more obvious emotions than a home laser printer. Yet knowing more about the emotional state of that laser printer buyer and the sort of context that puts them in the mood to buy is going to be far more valuable than most types of demographic targeting.
Or, to give an easy example, think of how out of place a feel-good spot for a restaurant chain feels against a scene of air raid sirens blaring.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are an advertiser or an ad agency and you have not yet looked at contextual targeting, our TVREV Special Report is a very good place to start.
It’s written as a primer of sorts and focuses on five companies who are helping to define the space.
If you’ve already read the report, think about how emotion plays into your marketing campaign, and how you can use it to deliver your message in a more authentic and relevant manner.
It’s at least worth looking into.
Similarly, if you are a seller, make sure to promote the emotional impact of your programming and how it provides a better environment for your client’s ads.
There’s plenty of research out there to back you up.
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.