What buyers think about when they think about the future of media

A cookie-less world, yes. But also new media plans.

It’s December, which means prediction season.

I was curious about where media buyers think media is heading (especially since the beginning of the year had everyone just a bit nervous) as they’re the ones that build the plans and then make the buys. 

The conversations weren’t about specific predictions, but instead, trying to see how Gretzy-like media agencies are; you know, that whole skate-to-where-the-puck-is-going-not-where-it’s-at kind of thing. 

(Image via ImgFlip)

A world without cookies

The albatross around their necks at this moment is figuring out a cookie-less environment. 

“I love programmatic,” Patrick Kelly, SVP Group Director Digital Investments at Havas Media, recently told me. “I love the mechanisms. It gets a bad rap. How can I bring an audience to my buy? It’s just pipes that allow you to connect your data with client data and publisher data, and put together to build a more targeted, more respectful buy. Bad programmatic will die, good programmatic will live.”

Even in a post-cookie world? Yes, he said, but agencies need to have a client that has a good sense of their audience. 

“If you know your customer, you’ll be ok because you'll work with partners who know their customers well.”

Spotify, he said, is a great place for programmatic buying. It knows your habits, but also your email address. 

“If you’re able to merge with client first party data, you’ll serve something relevant,” he said. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, as we still don’t know what this world looks like, cautioned Sarah Polli, director for martech solutions at Hearts & Science, who’s leading a team to build out an agency playbook for the future. 

“We don’t have an answer, don’t know the solution,” she said. “We cannot say, ‘Do this,’ and it’ll work. We’re figuring this out together. Even Google (Chrome) doesn’t know.”

But what she wants to do: educate everyone, from agency members to vendors to clients through the agency. Her focus right now, in terms of adjusting to a cookie-less world: empowering the agency to ask questions, and understand the complexities between Google and Facebook, publishers, and the open web. And keeping a watchful eye on Unified ID 2.0.

“The umbrella of privacy will replace walled gardens,” she said. “In the past couple of weeks, the open web industry (DMPs, SSPs), it seems, there's been a big rally behind Unified ID 2.0. and Liveramp’s authentication solution, tying publishers back to the brands.” 

Right now, it looks like the industry is banking on email as the next best thing. For buyers, though, this is a problem, as people have gotten smart, creating multiple email accounts. We have our personal ones, our work ones, our junk ones, our shopping ones, etc. 

So how can we begin to tie junk email with personal email, especially when we don’t have device id’s with iOS? Polli says IDFA opt-in is already starting to hurt, as there’s a massive dropoff in matching, even though prompts haven't been sent out.

Clients have 20 percent matching, based on how people opted out for tracking and location. It’s already happening, and for advertisers, it’s a bit of sticker shock. 

“Folks weren’t ready for Apple’s changes,” she said. “It wasn’t explicitly clear until it happened. iOS 14 has 50 percent adoption in 6 weeks, which was much faster than iOS 13 and that makes for a whirlwind at the end of year.”

Even if the industry doesn't have an answer, agencies have to be aware of the impact IDFA is having. Measurement is baked off of app downloads and installs, and you can only see 20 percent instead of 80 percent, buyers say. For some companies they need to report out for Q4 and early next year. 

As one media buyer told me, requesting anonymity because they weren’t allowed to speak to media, “We’re seeing that impact, and the focus has been on cookies, but we have a year runway. Google has hinted not a firm timeline, so there’s more runway so we can make more changes now. We’re trying to get this on the forefront; we need to think about tech and data first. If you plan a media plan on Q3 and it’s reliant on third party cookies, that won't work. We’re trying to shift where data and tech is the beginning of process.”

Or as Lewis Rothkopf, president of Martin AI, a new DSP, told me:

“There’s a small subset of publishers and intermediaries working hard to convince themselves that it’s 1999 and it’s contextual all over again. No more cookies! I get why the DCNs (trade body Digital Content Next) of the world have this view, but marketers are addicted to hyper targeting and reaching consumers isn’t going away.”

Media plan of the future

Because of the shift away from cookies, agencies are looking at data in different ways to create their media plans.

Polli said that her agency is doubling down on first party, and then second party data. First party is the client’s data; second party is data collected and owned by the platforms. Agencies are slowly moving away from the Oracles, Acxioms and Neustars of the world, which aggregate data and don’t give buyers the transparency of consent they’re looking for. 

“We want people to use consented data,” Polli said. “Shifting form ‘do not sell’ to ‘do not share’ that’s a whole different ball game (CPRA). Those third parties may not have anything to aggregate.”

And this, Havas Media’s Kelly said, means that the media plan will change. He argues that the media plan is archaic: ‘here’s my delivery to you of these static images, and here’s my blocking flowchart, and here’s how I spend your money; all based on data.’

“No one leaves understanding how actual people are going to experience this media,” he said. “You have to put yourself in the mind of the consumer, put your media pin in places meaningful for people. Plans that only look at math fall flat; you don't take into account how consumers behave with media, regardless as a channel. The industry got to a point where the vast majority of consumers are bothered by us.” 

Kelly says that Havas Media has been changing the way it builds media plans, focusing on this ‘media experience.’ And yes, the plan still ends up with: here’s what it’ll cost, here are the impressions, here are the overall effective mechanics. But for Kelly and Havas, the media plan can no longer be a static thing. 

“It’s becoming far less transactional,” Kelly said. “Something we’re in the midst of: there’s a couple of us locally (in the us) that are actually so frustrated by the way we RFP our publishing partners (that in itself is antiquated; it’s such a transactional conversation/behavior, that what you get back is highly transactional that when you go live, the consumer doesn’t know) but what you should be doing is taking to a partner, saying: I’m requesting an experience.”

According to Betsy Bartholomew, media director at Integrity, there’s some truth to this. Writing a predictions post, she points to how people consume media. It is not monolithic.

• Over 51% of Gen Z increased their online video consumption

• Millennials have increased consumption across online video, digital TV and broadcast TV

• Gen X has increased their TV consumption more than any other age group, but nearly all of it is online

• Boomers have changed their consumption habits the most of any demo when it comes to streaming and on-demand video. Viewing is up for both along with traditional broadcast TV.

“If everything comes to fruition, a media planner’s job will become ‘media experience’ people,” Kelly said. “And the number of publishers on plans will be smaller, but what you’re doing with those will be far more meaningful. It doesn’t mean there’s not enough fit for publishers, but you need to make sure it’s a publication fit for who your readers are.”

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Grateful Dead, “Playin’ in the Band” (5/28/77)

Some interesting links:

For media hires:

• Miami Herald names Monica Richardson first Black executive editor in paper’s history (Miami Herald)

For monolith enthusiasts:

• The whimsy of the first discovery in Utah has worn off with each subsequent find. (Daily Beast)

For TV predictions for the next decade:

• A 67-page report from Wall Street analysts predicts the global TV industry's likely winners and losers in the next decade. Here are the 6 key takeaways. (Business Insider)

• National TV Ad Sales Shrank 11% This Year, But Are Bouncing Back (Adweek)

For media buyers:

• Year-End Global/U.S. Ad Forecasts Improve Markedly (MediaPost)

For the economy:

• US millennials were grappling with the inequality of a K-shaped economy long before Covid-19 (Quartz)

For retailers selling hate:

• The Economy of Hate: How Online Retailers Profit Off of Right-Wing Extremists (The Progressive)

For adtech rebrand:

• A digital ad firm just raised $11 million to help brands like United Airlines and Ticketmaster build their own ad businesses (Business Insider)

For journalists talking about journalists:

• How journalists learned to stop worrying and love the audience (Nieman Lab)

• A Powerful Reporter Got Away With Sexual Misconduct for Decades. His Paper, and His Union, Looked the Other Way. (NYT)