The media industry is ripe for change. But can it?

Hello, and welcome to Tuesday, the blandest day of the week. Since we’ve been pushed out of our normal routines, I’ve come to the realization that we are all just living in a perpetual Tuesday. This is a hill I will die on, and will repeat this on every platform should I have the chance:

Mondays have the blues; Wednesday is Hump Day. Thursday for us olds is Must See TV, but for most of us, it’s the preamble to the weekend. We all sigh a breath of relief on Fridays. Saturday and Sunday give us the weekend. Tuesday, it seems, has no moniker, no marker, no day. (Sure, Taco Tuesday, but you can eat a taco on any day.) It is boring. It is non-essential. It is ... Tuesday. 

Anyway. On this Tuesday, however, instead of waiting in line to get into some midtown theater to eventually sit in tiny seat to watch celebrities pretend to care about the business side of their business for a few hours, that three-ring circus known as the TV Upfronts, we’re at home on our couches in our sweat pants and eating cake for breakfast. The new normal.

Like every other aspect of our lives, the TV Upfronts have gone Zooming. Virtual events are being planned, as networks are using streaming platforms to supplement, if not supplant, the in-person event. And the industry rejoiced! 

ViacomCBS, for example, was originally slated to do its annual dog-and-pony show tomorrow, but instead, is now doing two virtual events next week. 

Fox, it seems, took a page out of the original Upfront playbook (which began in 1962 as a way for the three TV networks to show advertisers what programs were coming in the Fall) and just put out its Fall lineup. But it also acknowledged these weird times and the company’s role in providing a distribution mechanism for advertisers to get out their messages.

“In remote meetings with advertising and marketing partners over recent weeks, we sought to listen first and understand each partner’s unique concerns,” said Charlie Collier, CEO of Fox Entertainment. “Our primary goal is to help them back to business, so in turn, the message we’ve shared is one of relative stability on FOX, combining the best of primetime sports and entertainment with which to help our partners and their customers back to market.” 

Yesterday, NBCUniversal’s ad sales team took a swing, as over the last month, the company announced a few ways it’s trying to help marketers deliver better results. For example, it would reduce linear ad loads during the pandemic, pushing for more 30-second spots and fewer 15-second ones. But the bigger story from the presentation (not its Upfront, which will be at a later date) was the network pitching “change.”

The trade press framed the streaming presentation as:

• NBCU calls for ad industry to use the pandemic to fix what’s broken (AdAge)

• NBCUniversal eyes 15-second ad reduction, aims to transform industry during pandemic (Adweek)

“This industry, it’s changing no matter what—it just happened much faster than anyone expected,” said Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s chairman of advertising and partnerships. “Now is the time to ask ourselves even bigger questions, like: How do we change measurement to focus on the impact that you need right now? How do we make all of our technology work together? Or, more importantly, what do we want this industry to look like when we come out on the other side? We have permission to change the things we know need to change. Let's do it already.”

Important questions, for sure. And if there’s a media company positioned to effect change, it’s NBC. But the media buying/selling dance—for tv, digital, print—is a highly choreographed one that requires both parties to have some concessions in order for everyone to get what they want: publishers, that sweet ad money; advertisers, that audience. The challenge, of course, becomes when those compromises beget more compromises beget more compromises.

How can an industry change when the process is so completely broken? My favorite example of the inefficiencies of the buying and selling of media:

Let’s say you are a giant soft-drink company who wants to reach a particular audience across TV, print and digital. You go to your media agency with the brief, but the agency doesn’t have one team servicing the client; it has several—a TV buying crew, a print buying crew, and a digital buying crew. And they rarely, if ever, talk to each other. 

Now let’s say you are a modern media company that has a TV channel, a print publication and a digital presence. Instead of dealing with one media team, you now have to deal with three. And because of this, media companies will often divide their sales teams between agency reps and client reps, making it difficult for sellers to create relationships with buyers, or buyers able to leverage the power of their spend to its fullest.

But maybe now, in the midst of global upheaval, things can change.

Writing in AdAge yesterday, Rino Scanzoni, the former investment chief at GroupM, argued that this year, the television industry has the unique chance to change:

“This pandemic will obviously disrupt the media marketplace significantly as consumer behavior faces a new normal and companies are forced to adapt their marketing strategies accordingly. It will also give the TV marketplace the opportunity to rethink the buying process to better serve individual clients and compete more effectively.” 

One data point around this: the scatter market. New research from SQAD, as reported yesterday by MediaPost, found that 

“In another sign of weakening ad demand -- and a troubling indicator for 2020-21 upfront network TV ad negotiations -- the delta between upfront and scatter ad prices narrowed to its closest point in recent memory in April.”

Of course, the Upfront market is significantly larger than scatter, but a data point, nonetheless that seems to say: if marketers can get better rates on scatter, why commit to an upfront?

Another data point, one that NBC alluded to, was measurement. In December, Magna found that 29 percent of TV commercials were shown to an empty room. Yesterday, Adweek reported that: “According to a study from Magna, around 99% of people are present or within a viewable distance of their screen for at least one second when a video ad appears. But viewer presence declines over time, dipping below 94% after six seconds.”

Of course, when watching a video ad, a) you’re obviously in front of a screen; and b) skip buttons start at 6 seconds, so...

But the notion that being viewable doesn’t equate to performance (digital), and performance doesn’t equate to being viewable (TV) should have the industry question what we agree is a standard unit of measurement.

The coronavirus, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, has highlighted how the media business is built on a house of cards. But I do think there’s opportunity to right many of the industry’s wrongs. It will take the will of all parts of the media supply chain to agree, which will not be easy as there’s too much money floating around from folks who like the opacity, if not the status quo. 

Or, we can run around creating solutions for problems that don’t quite exist and when that fails, blame it on the pandemic.

David Bowie, “Changes”

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips or thoughts on what I should be paying attention to, drop me a line! See you tomorrow.

Some interesting links:

• Great profile of the comedian Ramy Youssef (GQ)

• Online funeral businesses take off amid coronavirus (WSJ)

• The Last Dance: Is the MJ doc a dressed-up puff piece? (The Guardian)

• As States Rush to Reopen, Scientists Fear a Coronavirus Comeback (NYT)

• Facebook is quietly helping to set up a new pro-tech advocacy group to battle Washington (WaPo)

• The confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who saved the internet (Wired)