Commentary

Mitch Oscar's Cultural Elephant In The Living Room

by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, March 1, 2011

One of the many reasons I love the role Mitch Oscar is playing in our industry is that he's not afraid to say the truth. And he dropped a pretty big truth bomb during the OMMA Global "living room wars" panel. As panelists debated the rightful place for TV and video content in the living room, and the degree to which advertising will play a role in it, Oscar reminded attendees that there's "another cultural issue" holding billions of dollars worth of advertising from the online video marketplace. And it isn't the consumer's culture. It's Madison Avenue's culture.

"The more money I translate into online video, the less of a future I have," Oscar said, speaking figuratively as a typical agency television buyer. The reason, Oscar said, is that the culture of agency TV buying groups is an incestuous one in which buyers often get promoted within their agencies – or even get jobs from their counterparts on the TV selling side, making far more money than they do on the buy side – all by buying more television. Not online video.

As for the poor brave soul TV buyers who think about making that shift, Oscar noted that they would be competing with homegrown digital native Turks who grew up planning, buying and spinning online media. Game over.

Thanks for saying what everyone thinks, Mitch.

1 comment about "Mitch Oscar's Cultural Elephant In The Living Room".

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Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, March 2, 2011 at 2:38 a.m.
He makes one good point. But there's another reason the media buyer's can't recommend buying in online video: the impact on business doesn't develop.
Advertising only makes sense if I can see an impact that justifies the cost - increased retail traffic, increased sales, increased brand results (not terribly reliable), a direct response, or directly increased traffic to a website.
So far, most use of online video advertising has been throw-away - done without expectation of a result. But that won't last.
In fact, I have tested on behalf of clients and am familiar with many other people who have been testing online video advertising purchases. The result? In traditional TV, we are able to get a business result that justifies the spend. But with online video advertising, the result doesn't merely not jusitfy the cost. Instead, the result is almost entirely absent - missing - nil.
That's a very, very serious problem. So as we all dash into this future, we also need to be careful that we don't advise clients to replace effective advertising with ineffective advertising - just because it has the word "video" in the title.
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