Commentary

Can Legacy Linear TV Owners Really Expand To Full-Funnel Marketing?

Traditional media -- especially linear TV-- sees top-of-the-funnel awareness continuing to fuel virtually all its advertising revenues. But will the bottom-of-the-funnel pushes -- where consumers engage in specific actions to purchase or consider -- really make enough gains for marketers?

You see the likes of NBCUniversal doing lots more on-the-ground “shoppable” related marketing efforts, or the likes of ESPN, NBC Sports or Fox Sports, Sinclair's Diamond Sports Group or others diving into sports betting. Anything that drives consumers into the arms of marketers is considered.

Streaming platforms -- advertising video-on-demand services -- hope that more digitally connected TV will give advertisers some advantages -- even as Apple IOS pulls back on “cookie”-based connections through changes on its “opt-in” policy.

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No matter. Linear TV continues to weaken. MoffettNathanson Research believes linear TV will see a decline of 1% when it comes to revenue and share this year -- and dipping lower over the next five years by around 6% on a compounded annual growth rate.

A cookieless world is also eating into the business of companies like Facebook. The research firm says this is happening as it moves away from the bottom-of-the-funnel stuff, shifting more to where linear TV resides -- at the top of the funnel.

Figure then that even with the hit Facebook has taken vis a vis Apple's decision, the social media platform might be more inclined to find a way to compete with linear TV in terms of video and content.

Who is in better shape going forward? Google and Amazon -- two companies that increasingly have a full range of marketing for the funnel.

This means everything from YouTube TV to Google Search for Google.

For Amazon, it means point-of-purchase data all the way up to NFL “Thursday Night Football” and Amazon Fire TV advertising revenue.

TV networks have amped up many efforts around new measures and possible new currencies. But do marketers really want much more from them?

Do they want data that not only traces the consumers travel path to specific business outcomes but all specific stops along the way?

1 comment about "Can Legacy Linear TV Owners Really Expand To Full-Funnel Marketing?".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, March 23, 2022 at 10:25 a.m.

    Wayne, what your question really asks is do marketers want the TV time sellers to guarantee sales? And the answer is ---why not? The problem is  that's not the function of a TV time seller. The mandate to their stockholders is to capture audiences for their program content, in a certain style or genre and monetize said audience either via ad dollars or other means---like subscriptions---or both.

    It may be that some desperate "long tail" channel with a handfull fof viewers might guarantee sales to get a few ad dollars but beyond that this is asking too much. For example, imagine that there are two competing brands in a category and both want a major TV time seller to guarantee a certain amount of incremental sales as the price for their ad dollars. In effect this positions the seller as betting on both rivals to increase sales---chiefly made at the expense of  eachother. Is that a reasonable premise for the seller to operate from?And what about the seller's profit on the deal? If the seller is a "partner" with both brands shouldn't they guarantee a certain level of profit for the seller if the seller gets their business?

    This question has arisen many times in the past and there are plenty of theorists and utopian dreamers who  buy into it---but not media sellers. To be sure there are examples in print media where magaines have guaranteed sales or share of market "lifts" but these were always well controlled operations involving safe bets by the sellers --past on past experience  with similar situations. The guarantees sounded great---but were basically, a sales promotional  ploy for the sellers---and this approach certainly didn't save the publishers who tried it. 

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About the Author

Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.