Leading off the Advanced Advertising Summit on June 21, part of L.A. TV Week, B+C longtime business editor Jon Lafayette chatted with Mike Fisher, executive director, investment innovation, at media agency GroupM. Their chat followed a presentation by Fisher about pressure points facing the advertising industry as identified by GroupM. Audiences are fragmented: Top shows were generating 10 Nielsen ratings points in 2014, but now they barely break a 1.0. People are watching on numerous devices, not just a TV, and premium content lives across all of those outlets, increasingly being streamed, not broadcast. Specific “walled garden” approaches to measuring viewers across platforms don’t necessarily communicate with each other, and data can be hard to pry away from the platform providers to benefit the advertiser. Topics like that. Highlights of their chat, at the Sofitel Los Angeles in Beverly Hills, are presented here with edits made for clarity and space.
Jon Lafayette: You talked about the way that you may have to change the way you approach planning. Does that entail starting with traditional media and filling it with streaming? Or are you starting with streaming in order to, in order to build a plan?
Mike Fisher: Yeah, I think traditionally we are starting with traditional and filling it in with streaming. I don't think this is the desired state long-term. I actually believe that we should be starting with audience, starting with streaming and audience optimizing. Linear does still drive a good amount of tonnage. And being able to include audience-based linear in a plan is important as well. We don't want to break out a streaming budget, a linear budget, an addressable budget, a data-driven budget. It starts with an audience. And if we can find that audience in traditional reach and frequency, linear, that's great. Increasingly, as I talked about, we can't, so we need to add these things in. But they shouldn't be thought of as add-ons later on. We should be looking at all supply equal and what’s the best way to take that audience and find them everywhere they're watching?
JL: You also talked about the walled gardens getting higher. Are the YouTubes and the Netflixes and the Amazons becoming more transparent as they sell more advertising and measurement, as companies like iSpot, Comscore, even Nielsen get better at measuring streaming?
MF: They are starting to open up a little bit more on the data front. I don’t think we have any illusions that we’re all of a sudden going to start getting real-time data feeds from Google that give us all sorts of information about their users. That's not something that they've built their entire business on. Privacy is paramount to these people. But we have seen more open understanding of why we need some sort of interoperability, whether or not it's some sort of common identifier or common industry-led standard, to at least give us the ability to do cross-publisher frequency capping, cross-publisher audience rolling up, stuff like that.
JL: You are head of a new investment innovation group. Tell me about investment innovation and what it takes to convince a client to try something new.
MF: Sure. That’s a loaded question. So the idea of investment innovation is to figure out, you know, how do we spend our clients’ money better using technology? And it’s not just how do we do it with clients. I would say 60% of my job is internal. How do I get our team to think about how convergence works? How do I get legacy TV buyers to better understand the value of impression-based buying and audience-based buying? How do I get digital buyers who are thinking in tonnage and thinking in, ‘just deliver an impression, at a moment’ to understand the value of premium content and the importance of content and context matching up with an ad message. So it’s all sorts of internal blocking and tackling as well as our clients understanding how do they use the technology ecosystem better to accomplish their goals. And then I also work very closely with the networks themselves who we buy media from to make sure that what they’re working on and developing are the same things that our clients are asking for from us.
JL: So you must see all the new stuff first. What have you seen lately that really looks like it might have some value to the agency and tier clients?
MF: I mean, the easy answer to say is AI. But I don’t believe that. I don’t think we are at a point right now where AI can help us do our jobs any better than the tools that we already have. I think some of the cooler stuff is around measurement and longer-term understanding of the value that a specific airing or delivery of an impression-based ad has on, not just driving viewership and audience, but driving long-term brand outcome. And the tools that allow us to take that and do more of that. The idea is that we have savings goals with all of our clients. What we tell our clients, and one of the things that my team has been telling our clients for the last two years, is we need to pay more for impressions, but we should buy way fewer impressions. We need to make the impressions that we're buying, they’re going to cost more, more goes into it. They're going to look more expensive as an actual impression. But they’re going to generate far better results and we’re going to buy far fewer of them. And our clients are going to save money by reducing waste. And then we’re going to take that understanding and feed that back into the planning cycle so we can do more of what’s working.
JL: So which is more important, the saving money part or the becoming more effective part? Which, which one sells better?
MF: I’m not going to answer that question. [Audience laughs.]
JL: So have you ever found a thing, it sounded like a really good idea and it just blew up, didn't work, was vaporware. How much of that goes on in the advanced advertising realm?
MF: I’ve said this before, a lot of times we as TV people score ourselves a little bit too harshly. I was at a conference a couple of months ago where I was on stage with a panelist. He was talking about how, you know, the level of innovation that's happening in the TV space is not the same as the level of innovation that’s happening in other spaces. I think it’s bullshit. I think we”ve done a really great job and should celebrate the wins of pulling a industry that was stuck in their ways in television for the same 40 to 50 years forward rapidly. And I'm not saying it’s perfect. There are technology limitations that make it more difficult for us to conduct business the way we would ideally want to be conducting business. But we’ve done a damn good job of getting clients and getting our network partners and the ad tech ecosystem and everybody, even as an agency, all of us coming together to say we can be doing our jobs better and we can be delivering more accountable, targetable, measurable impressions today while the backend plumbing gets built for tomorrow.
JL: In terms of innovation, there's been a lot of talk about currency. I guess the networks all got together before the Joint Industry Committee and then had to convince media buyers to get involved in the process. How do you see, how do you see that process working? Is that going to, is that going to move the ball in terms of, uh, creating currencies, uh, that are based on data you guys have already been using to shape your media buys?
MF: Currency is one of those things that we think a lot about, right? Currency is how we are paying for, and how a seller is selling us, an ad. The JIC, the Joint Industry Committee, which I’m very pro-JIC, is not designed to create currencies. It is designed to create measurement standards that are currency-grade. Media technology providers Nielsen, Comscore, VideoAmp, iSpot and others: They’re creating measurement tools that are validated as being currency-grade. Currency is decided between the buyer and the seller. It is up to me and Paramount and NBC and Warner [Bros.] Discovery to determine how are we transacting using the measurement vendors that are in place. So when Nielsen stands up and says C3 is the currency of record this year, it’s not unless we and the media seller decide to transact on that. So it’s not up to the media, the measurement companies to create currencies. It’s up to them to create strong measurement tools that we believe can be currency-grade.
JL: And does changing your currency change what you buy?
MF: I don’t think so. Because at the end of the day, it’s all counting. We just wanna make sure that we’re counting the right way.
JL: Where are you guys now in terms of Nielsen versus other currencies in terms of what you're buying and how you're buying it?
MF: We were very disappointed that Nielsen was not ready this year to move away from panel-only data. Nielsen has been talking a lot around their Nielsen One suite to enable big data plus the Nielsen panel. They were not ready for this year’s upfront to be transacted on it. So most of this year’s upfront will continue to transact on the legacy Nielsen panel-only data sets. But we are running side-by-side shadow currency tests using [other] measuring companies, like I mentioned, to get a better understanding of where the discrepancies between panel only and panel plus big data lie.
JL: How much disruption is that? And how will that change when there's a choice on a menu of like five or six different currencies that you could approach different deals with different clients on?
MF: At the end of the day, you know, I think we as an industry still need to figure out how these different currency-grade products fit together. Our clients don’t want to look at four or five different reports for four or five different media sellers. They want one number that’s validated as being able to say, ‘This is how much money I spent, this is how many of my intended audience saw that unit.’ So I think we're still trying to figure out how we bring together different measurement standards to create that. That’s really one of the benefits of the JIC, which is to create the common standards that everybody’s using, both on the buy and sell side, but also validate that the measurement standards are consistent enough that you could bring these data sets together.
JL: The networks did all of their wonderful upfront presentations in May mostly. Since then it's been sort of quiet. What's the economy look like? What does the media economy look like? What are, what are people talking about as the upfronts slowly, quietly move along?
MF: I wouldn't say quiet, I would say deliberate. We believe that it is a buyer’s market this year. Viewership has changed. You know, we are looking at a little bit of uncertainty with the current WGA strike as well as the potential of the SAG strike. We don't believe it'll have an immediate impact, but we do think it could have an impact longer term on some networks, especially ones that are heavy into scripted content. So we are being a little bit more deliberate than usual as we approach the marketplace. But we're having good conversations and we have seen a lot of excitement from our clients around the role of the upfronts.
JL: So does that create a bigger opportunity for the digital people who are selling already created content to be able to grab bigger shares of media budgets?
MF: I think yes, but it also creates a big opportunity for the traditional networks who have a vast amount of library content in streaming services that they own outright. Being able to say, you know, even shows that were huge 10 or 15 years ago — Lost, Mad Men. Those types of shows are new to an entire generation of people. That's new content. There’s a lot of people out there who never saw Lost, and that’s the type of stuff that the networks that have that library content and understand how to drive people to that during a time when it may be harder to have first-run new content being produced due to the economy, economic conditions or the strike, they will win out for that.
JL: So premium content doesn't necessarily have to be new content.
MF: Correct. It’s what's new to you, what's premium to you when you want to watch it.
JL: And that includes, and I think you talked about this a little bit in your presentation, all the stuff that’s on the YouTubes and the TikToks and stuff like that. That's where you're going when it comes time for people do their TV buying now.
MF: No, not to me and not to most of us in the room, but to the next generation, yes.
JL: And how does that affect the way all the dollars are allocated? Is it on a generational basis?
MF: It’s all about a deeper understanding of the audience. That's where we get into the idea of multi-varied audience planning. Not just saying, ‘Hey, you're looking for somebody who eats breakfast to buy Pop-Tarts,’ but someone who eats breakfast at 6 a.m., you know, before they go to school. That's probably a TikTok audience. Stuff like that.
JL: And how do you make sure that when you're buying that kind of content that you're not getting into objectionable areas, that it's not either poorly produced, misinformation, those sorts of things? That you're not adjacent to that kind of content? That is hard to police.
MF: Group M has a fairly robust responsible investment framework that includes user-generated content, objectionable content, news, anything that would be questionable for brand adjacency. So we do a pretty good job of screening for that and baking that into our deals. You know, obviously, it becomes harder to police [objectionable material] in user-generated content. That's why tools like YouTube Select and some of the more brand-safe aggregators, sold directly by the end seller, there's more accountability there.
JL: And does that actually work? I mean, how many times do you get complaints about, uh, about how did our ad run there? Is it, what's the visibility to where ads actually run as the supply chains get more and more convoluted?
MF: I wouldn’t say that there’s a massive amount of complaints we get. Obviously, when you're dealing with an audience-targeted world, stuff does slip through the same way it does slip through in digital. A great example is if you are in the market for travel and you may see maybe inside of an audience and see an Airbnb ad. Um, it's not because Airbnb is sponsoring this particular objectionable piece of content. It's how digital advertising works. You’re in the audience that got bought. It slipped through. It’s few and far between. We very rarely have clients call us or the vendors that we work with very rarely catch these issues.
