• by Mitch Oscar , Op-Ed Contributor, January 26, 2010

Back in July, I had written a TV Board entitled "All Along The Watchtower: An Ode To Agency Researchers." The piece was prompted by Steve Sternberg's forced exit from his decaded home at McCann and Magna. He was one of the many prominent, agency researchers - David Ernst, Bruce Gorelich, Tony Jarvis, David Marans, Susan Nathan, Stacey Lynn Schulman, and Jon Swallen to name a few - who in recent years had become a statistic, as opposed to a calculation in the evolution of the advertising agency business.

When I began as a national TV buyer in 1975 there was nothing more important than the TV program share meetings prior to the TV upfront led by the research department. Days were spent: screening network pilots, vivisecting star power and ensembles, scrutinizing show genres and movie packages (made for TV, mini-seriesed and theatricals), tracking audience flow, discussing foundation time periods, swinging in program hammocks, tabulating homes using television, calculating program shares by network and across time periods, investigating lead-ins/lead-outs and competitive posturing, and evaluating spin-off potential as well as program franchise extensions. None would have been possible without the guidance and wizardry of the agency researching soothsayer. Of course, those were the days of average broadcast network primetime 30 shares, with household rating of 17.5, media departments of full service agencies garnering commissions of 15%, and compliance with the unwritten rule that TV upfront negotiations concluded by late May's Memorial Day so that media buying personnel could have a restful summer.

Those go-went years have spawned broadcast network rating plummets, cable network program share maturation, and the routinely occurring program births, deaths and resurrections with marginal audience engagement - compared to the good ole days. In my estimation, the emphasis an agency once placed on individual program performance prognostication has paled. Instead, focus has shifted to all sorts of mixing and matching disparate rating information (traditional and evolving), audience profiling, engagement, behavior, interactivity, socializing, datamining, mapping and motility tracking, and cross-platforming media melding. In recent years agencies have been subscribing less to the various and sundry data sources available. After all, with commissions in the traditional realm less than 3% and the online sector steadily sinking from heights of 15+% in their heyday, how could they afford to. Whereas content providers, platforms, and data aggregators have and will most likely continue to assume the additional responsibility and cost of generating and supplying multisource data to agencies. Major media conglomerates, such as NBCU/Comcast, Disney, News Corp. and MTV Networks, will attempt to sell their universe of platforms as delivering a unique audience with distinctive characteristics emphasizing the promise to build and fortify symbiotic brand relationships - theirs and the advertiser's.

So, as the agency researchers continue to migrate, exiled or by choice, from their agency environs to the realms of content providers, data aggregators and televisual platforms (linear TV, on demand, broadband, mobile), it occurred to me that the role of the TV buyer will be significantly modified. Research data utilized to access program and platform value propositions will be delivered to TV buying agencies in tandem with inventory proposals which will no longer be evaluated by traditional TV buying methodology: cost per thousands, viewing data, some demographics, added valuables, program mix, relationships, and a hand shake. Instead a new generation of TV buyers will sprout that possess a unique blend of electronic mastery, business acumen and the ability to wade through reams of data sources to choose the best possible, efficient scenarios that are available within a dynamic negotiating process.