• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, June 6, 2016

The industry was abuzz last week with rumors that the long awaited Association of National Advertisers agency holding investigation report was going to be published by Friday. Business Insider and The Wall Street Journal reported extensively on what was to be expected, and the WSJpublished statements from the large agency holding companies all stating the same: “we operate within the rules and the laws of the land and we have done nothing improper.”

Still, the report did not come. So instead of reading and interpreting the ANA findings, I spent the weekend with Mary Meeker. Well, not with her in person, but her annual Internet Trends report, now via Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.

First things first. She still uses that dumb comparison of time spent vs. ad spend comparison. Given that I have railed against that now three years in a row, I am not going to repeat myself. It is a meaningless comparison. The rest of the deck is full of partly frightening, partly exciting insights derived from an enormous amount of data.

There are chapters on China (past its prime for growth), India (promises, promises), mobile phones (saturated), the global economy (shifting east despite China’s slowdown), the car industry (more change in the next five to 10 years than in the past 50, according to GM CMO Mary Barra), messaging, voice control, data and privacy. Apparently, my Amazon Echo is listening to me all the time, which means she will probably become the dumbest self-learning device in the universe.

But what can marketers learn about data impacting advertising?

I had really hoped that Meeker would have filleted the broadcast industry in the same way as she has done the car industry, for instance. It would have been so interesting to see what Mary and her merry band of trend-watchers would make of current broadcast data in combination with the screen, data and consumer usage numbers available.

There is the slide 45 mention/accusation that marketers are still spending too much money on traditional advertising channels vs. the time consumers spend with them. Then there is slide 47 with ad-blocking data, but the issue is kind of pooh-poohed. 

This either means that KPCB’s oracle reads the tea leaves differently, or she is a little naïve about the impact of this phenomenon.

This is followed by an expansive review of how video is driving a re-imagination of advertising and broadcast (slides 77 – 89). In this section there is one slide on how all the screens come together for fans as they follow their favorite sports. And way in the back there is one mention of cord-cutting.

The video section concludes that Facebook Live and other, new live-streaming platforms are going to reshape the live viewing experience. This is the live-viewing argument that many broadcasters have held on to in pitches to advertisers, as the thing that is not going to go away: why advertisers invest so much in live sports (Olympics, Superbowl, etc.), live musicals and other live programming that supposedly drives “one-time-event-only” consumer interest.

For now, broadcast is an area where we have to continue to do our own analysis, even though an outsider’s view would have been so welcome. We can only hope that Meeker does something about broadcast next year.