David Bloom:
Hey everybody, I'm David Bloom with Next TMT. We are here wrapping up Thursday's highlights and looking forward to Friday, the last day of the show. I'm joined by my co-founder of Next TMT, Daniel Frankel and Bevin Fletcher, the birthday girl, we should say, and also senior editor of StreamingTV Insider. Because it's your birthday, Bevin, let's start with you.
Bevin Fletcher:
Oh, joy.
David Bloom:
What cool things have you seen besides candles to blow out today at the show, which is really, this is the meat of the show today. There was plenty on Wednesday, plenty coming tomorrow, but this is the full Monty as it were.
Daniel Frankel:
David, don't ask her how many candles she blew out. That's implying.
David Bloom:
I didn't specify the number.
Daniel Frankel:
I was just making sure. Sometimes you do that [inaudible 00:00:53].
Bevin Fletcher:
Anyway, moving on. So-
David Bloom:
So.
Bevin Fletcher:
Well, I think I'll talk first. One of the interesting things I saw was on a CTV Ad Tech panel, where a big topic that came up was lack of transparency and lack of standardization. And I think that's something a lot of people are aware of, but-
David Bloom:
And we've been hearing about that for a while.
Bevin Fletcher:
Yes, it's not new.
David Bloom:
A long while.
Bevin Fletcher:
It is not new, but it's to the point of why ad dollars aren't flowing as the viewership shifts. I think Kelly McMahon gave a really good example in terms of the metadata available. You're not just talking what team is playing in this sports category. A category you can buy is literally et cetera. You want to invest dollars against et cetera.
David Bloom:
I'm not big on buying in et cetera myself, but I'm not even in the business, so-
Bevin Fletcher:
Yeah. So, to me, I could understand why maybe someone wouldn't have confidence. That seems like a big issue.
David Bloom:
Okay.
Bevin Fletcher:
So that kind of hammered it home and everyone on the panel was kind of in agreement that more standardization is needed.
David Bloom:
Interesting. So Dan, what kinds of things, similarly, though you're not a birthday boy and you've had many more birthdays behind you than Bevin does.
Daniel Frankel:
A few.
David Bloom:
What did you see at the show that caught your ear?
Daniel Frankel:
Well, David, a dreadful thing has happened. It was serving a consumer market, perhaps one of the worst thing has happened, the consumer has gotten more sophisticated. And that's always dangerous.
David Bloom:
You hate it when that happens. It's always terrible.
Daniel Frankel:
No, I had great conversations with Roku, Samsung Ads and Philo today. And that was kind of a recurring thing. They've all been in business for a while since the dawn of the streaming age. And they've seen a real evolution in how the consumer responds, the content and ads. Spoke with Justin Fromm, who is head of insights at Samsung Ads. And a part of this comes from the audience has aged into a point of consumer decision making. Millennials who grew up with the internet are now heads of households. They didn't necessarily grow up with lean back advertising. To them, it's an interactive experience. So there's an expectation that advertising will be different than it is.
David Bloom:
This is really driven, you're talking about the millennials growing up, but I think younger generations even are much more willing to change things, get out of something, cancel an SVOD subscription, et cetera, et cetera, and not just cruise along and stack up costs and not watch stuff, right?
Daniel Frankel:
Well, yeah, these insights are helpful. What I thought was really interesting, I think Justin put an inefficiency price tag of $146 billion, it's a striking figure, on just the amount of money that's sort of being squandered right now as advertisers kind of overlap. I think 41% of ads hit consumers in both linear and streaming platforms. The same consumer is being impressioned twice. Understanding this consumer base is sort of critical to sort of making this a much more efficient, valuable proposition for advertisers.
David Bloom:
I think it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. I had five minutes with one of my favorite, and I'll say this, delicately pot stirrers, Laura Martin, the senior analyst for Needham & Company, who tracks the entire industry but looks at it-
Daniel Frankel:
Sure.
David Bloom:
... from a Wall Street perspective. Laura is the lead-off keynote speaker tomorrow, and she showcased a little bit about what she's going to talk about tomorrow, which is not necessarily what folks in this room want to hear. There are two big platforms that are doing things that Wall Street thinks makes sense. Amazon, with the e-commerce connection to the huge amount of ads it serves up that are highly contextual to the programming it shows and YouTube. And YouTube obviously is the giant pot into which all-
Daniel Frankel:
You what?
David Bloom:
Someday you'll hear about it. You might see it on your son's phone, for instance.
Daniel Frankel:
Oh, yeah, [inaudible 00:05:01].
David Bloom:
Yeah, he might've mentioned it to you in passing while he was ignoring you otherwise. But what'll happen is those are the two big companies that Wall Street pays attention to. What's going on here? Folks are going to need to partner up, they're going to need to bundle up and they need to be able to figure out how they can do some of what YouTube and Amazon are doing either with them or around them to be able to get through the next few years as we see more consolidation and probably less fragmentation. So it's going to be an interesting... I look forward to Laura. She had apparently quite the call to arms last year and this will be another one, so it's going to be fun.
Bevin Fletcher:
And even during Dave Bernath's Wurl presentation, he talked about YouTube's dominance and kind of in his view that they got there without even really trying. So imagine if they use their very deep pockets to-
David Bloom:
Right.
Bevin Fletcher:
... invest even more heavily.
David Bloom:
What happens if they get serious?
Bevin Fletcher:
What kind of force then? Yes, so-
David Bloom:
It's like, "Oh, oh." Yeah. It's going to be a big issue I think. Are there things happening tomorrow as the show-
Daniel Frankel:
First of all, let me just say one more thing about Dave Bernath.
David Bloom:
You want to say one more thing?
Daniel Frankel:
He did say something interesting on another panel yesterday.
David Bloom:
Dave Bernath?
Daniel Frankel:
He did, that we've reached kind of a plateau. He was talking specifically about the FAST business, but I think you could talk about all monetization schemes of streaming at this point. You also put your head on it. This is a week where Warner Bros. Discovery split in half. The consumer is getting more sophisticated, linear is not in a position to help us anymore. It is a moment of inflection and you kind of felt it here. I think next year you'll feel even more profoundly. It's [inaudible 00:06:49].
David Bloom:
Yeah, that'll be interesting to watch. And of course, when we all go to Lisbon for StreamTV in Lisbon, the European version of this, we'll be able to talk about it as Earl put it in Spanish, but it should be a lot of fun. Are there any things in particular tomorrow that either of you are looking forward to?
Bevin Fletcher:
You already called out Laura. Her presentation was really great last year.
David Bloom:
You cannot wait.
Bevin Fletcher:
Yeah, I'm pumped.
David Bloom:
You're going to be at the barricades on that one. Yeah.
Bevin Fletcher:
I'm excited for that.
David Bloom:
Yeah.
Daniel Frankel:
I'm talking to CommScope I think with you tomorrow at one point. They are a traditional telecom service company, vendor I should say, that's branching out to streaming, but incredible inroads to pay TV and a lot of very sophisticated technology that I don't think a lot of this constituency knows about. So sort of in the weeds new participant to the show that I think lots of things say, so...
David Bloom:
Should be very interesting. There's a lot of stuff coming up tomorrow. The show's going to wrap up in late afternoon, slightly earlier than a full day. They know it's heading into the weekend. It's been a full, very busy, very connected show. Among the things coming up, we've got Keynotes and Fireside Chats that include one from Vince Torres, the CMO for DIRECTV, FanDuel Chief Revenue Officer Eric Ratchman, Leader Round Tables that'll feature executives from Cineverse, Xperi, SlingTV, Discovery, The Weather Company, TCL, Scripps. These are really, I think great. I think you've really found the Leader Round Tables very interesting conversations with top executives. [inaudible 00:08:30] are going to love the keynote presentation on managing churn while your subscribers, you're still trying to attract subscribers because it's a really weird interaction [inaudible 00:08:40]-
Daniel Frankel:
This is a busy trade show Friday. I don't... Keep going.
David Bloom:
Yeah. And then Dolby and Paul Boustead will have another research keynote on the future of sports streaming and we'll wrap everything up with a little reception and wine and dine as you head out the door from Denver and we wrap up this show.
So with that, I will wrap things up. I am David Bloom with Next TMT with my co-founder Daniel Frankel and senior editor of StreamTV Insider, Bevin Fletcher on her birthday. So everybody give her a big happy birthday virtually. And with that, we'll wrap it up. Thanks.