Commentary

The Ad Industry Should Be Comfortable In Its Own Skin

by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, December 20, 2023

There is no alternative currency in advertising.

There, I said it. Are we all happy now?

The ad industry has an identity problem. In fact, it always has. It wants to be something more than it is, but it’s actually pretty darn great. The fact is advertising is a global behemoth of an industry, and it continues to grow. That growth is fueled by digital media and by the ongoing digitization of traditional media.

What’s more, digital media has a currency, and that currency is reach and engagement. If you click into reach and engagement, you come up with a bunch of sub-metrics that are indicative of how that form of media is viewed by the audience and used by the advertiser, and all of these metrics work great. If they didn’t work, then the industry would not be experiencing growth and would not have climbed to the heights it has reached today.

I bring this up because I had gotten out of the advertising and marketing tech business for the last five years and focused on other areas like collaboration tech and fintech. So I was able to view ad tech and martech through the eyes of a user rather than someone helping drive the industry from the inside. That was a refreshing perspective to get, and I wish more people had the same perspective.

Rather than always trying to reinvent how we measure ourselves; we should simply understand the way a marketer values us, and accept that for what it is. Instead, we spend lots of time trying to create new forms of measurement and force them unto an audience who knows what they want. That is an uphill, futile battle. You can’t tell someone you’re funny. You have to be funny, and they notice it based on what they do or do not consider to be funny.

The ad industry is filled with amazing people who are responsible for so many fantastic ideas being born into the world. Just this last month I have been reminded of how many great people work in this space by reconnecting with many of you. It has been energizing and refreshing.

Not everyone is “accredited” and not every impression is “verified,” but the audience who sees our messages delivered in new and interesting ways really doesn’t care. They really only care about two things: First, was that interesting? Two, is my privacy safe? As long as you do things right, and creatively, you should be able to achieve both of these goals.

We’re heading into 2024, an election year, which means more money will pour into advertising (for better or worse). It is the kinds of year where we can stop looking backward and start looking forward. New topics of conversation. New channels. New media. New everything. I read the trades, and I want to see more forward and progressive thinking, rather than just rationalization of our existence.

The advertising industry is strong, and it is growing. Let’s have 2024 be a year where we are comfortable enough with ourselves to focus on the future and have some fun again.

Cheers to 2024!

3 comments about "The Ad Industry Should Be Comfortable In Its Own Skin".

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John Grono from GAP Research, December 20, 2023 at 3:34 p.m.
I liked your sentence of "What’s more, digital media has a currency, and that currency is reach and engagement."

It brought back memories of how a few years ago in AU a huge social media company were proudly selling that they could reach 143% of 16-24s in Sydney each week. That is a mighty big currency.
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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, December 20, 2023 at 6:01 p.m.

To John's point, Cory, every medium can claim the same "currency"---"reach and engagement". The problem is that within each medium there are wide variations in the reach as well as the degree of context and attentiveness that individual networks, websites, publishers, stations, etc, can provide and their costs for trying to attain advertising audiences among various target groups differ just as widely. Then there's the matter of determining the optimum media mix and how to schedule your ads to avoid needless short term overkill in terms of exposures. Becuase of these and other factors it's vital to determine not only who is watching, reading or listening to each source of content but also to what extent these supposed "audiences" actually come into contact with the brand's ad message.

At present we use mostly seller -funded "audience" surveys that don't come close to answering such questions---which is why almost everybody in media is so worked up about trying to find a solution. It's not good enough to throw your ad dollars at a medium almost blindly and expect that its "reach" or "engagement" will do the rest for you. You've got to know a lot more about the specific options and how they interact to maximize the impact of your ad spend.

John Grono from GAP Research, December 20, 2023 at 6:49 p.m.

Good points Ed.

In AU the media underwrites the research and we as agencies subscribe (and work with the media and advertisers with the tech.) to each media industry 'currency'.

Back in the early 2000s, we wrote some internal software using a large data source (14+) which included claimed usage. The usage was much broader and less detailed than the 'currencies' but we were able to calculate a relatively robust de-duplication. For example, if (say) the TV reach was 55%, radio 22%, press 17%, OOH 26%, cinema 6%, digital 38% (remember this was 20-25 years ago and the numbers all made-up)) we knew it wasn't the sum (164%).

The key thing was to establish estimates of how much additional reach each media would provide (rather than weight). The good thing was that the results were understandable and believeable and the advertiser loved the estimates.

This approach is being used by OzTAM (TV) injecting third-party reliable data to produce VOZ (Virtual Australia) which is a video based 'currency' for all-screen cross-platform usage.