That's what my colleague Steve Smith just
asked me as we begin finalizing an agenda for our first-ever Planning & Buying Insider Summit in Austin later this year.
Full disclosure: I'm not an industry insider, I'm just a journalist who writes about them. So I'm doing what journalists do and asking the best sources I have -- you.
Based on some recent
conversations, pitches and observations, I'm using today's edition to tease a few subjects out, but what I'd really like is for some of you genuine insiders to give me feedback, shoot them down,
refine them, and/or suggest some topics that would be -- in Smith's words -- "fruitful" for debate.
As always, you can post them as comments below, or email me directly at
joe@mediapost.com.
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For guidance, Smith says "We are going to go meta and micro," with keynotes and panels tackling broad strategy questions such as "allocation, measurement, AI, creator
economy, etc. and then we want cases that drill into emerging media categories like metaverse/gaming/DOOH/Audio/Web3?"
Now here are the big planning and buying questions on my
trade reporter mind. Spoiler alert: I've already written extensively about some of them.
- The universe. No, not the astronomical one, but the media one. It's about to
change in a fundamental way. For most of my career covering the ad business, it was framed around Nielsen's TV universe, which so far has been the base buy for most national advertising plans, even
though there was an undefined digital universe expanding -- and some might say, overtaking -- it. Based on Media Rating Council briefing I sat in on late last week, the TV universe will effectively
disappear with the transition to "cross-platform" measurement beginning this year. And with it, the MRC has recommended the ad industry move from siloed media ways of thinking about universes, to one
based on the general population. You know, the Census. That makes sense for a lot of reasons, but what I'd really like to understand from all of you, is how does that shift impact the way you think
about, plan and value media? If TV really has been the lead dog -- the base buy -- framing the way national media plans are conceived, what happens when it's just a part of the mix. Is this finally
the end of a TV-centric planning mindset? Will it be replaced by a cross-platform one, which seems to be the goal of OpenAP, the U.S. JIC, and the big TV/streaming-centric suppliers driving it? Or
will a truly agnostic and holistic way of planning media grow out of it. You know, one based on a consumer-centric way of thinking about media? I could go on, but I want to save some of my questions
for a fruitful debate on stage in Austin.
- The "dark universe." Personally, this is one of my favorite theories about the media universe -- that for all the
metrics and methods the ad industry uses to define media, there are vast pockets of unmeasured media influencing both consumers and brands -- but they don't get on the plan, much less the buy list,
because they are not measurable, and therefore, not buyable. At least not in the way big advertisers and agencies are set up to plan, buy and post the impact of media. Needless to say, some forms of
the dark media universe have come to light in recent years vis a vis new ways of reaching and influencing consumers on behalf of brands. Things like "native content," influencer marketing, the
"creator economy," direct-to-consumer marketing, "retail media" (see separate bullet point below), but we're still only scratching the surface according to a state surfaced by Madison and Wall analyst
Brian Wieser, who while still at GroupM, came up with an estimate that marketers spend $6 trillion a year on marketing overall. That's at least twice as much as what most industry bean-counters have
previously benchmarked, which means there's an awful lot of media not being accounted for in most advertisers, agency and trade publisher discussions. To be fair, much of what Wieser says is in those
trillions of unaccounted for marketing budgets, probably isn't even measurable (think sandwich boards, flyers and forms of direct selling and
unstructured media that nonetheless are part of the total marketing universe and in some ways or another compete for both budget, as well as consumer attention, engagement and fulfillment.
- Retail media. One of the most fascinating "new" categories within the media universe is the relatively recent benchmarking of a humongous "retail media" category. By some
estimates, it's already more than $100 billion and at least one big agency (GroupM) forecasts it will be close to half a trillion dollars and will overtake TV ad spending soon. The funny thing, is
it's not actually entirely new. It's just emerged in a new form -- digitally via ecommerce sites, both pure-play, as well as digital extensions of physical retailers. Truth is, it's not entirely new.
When I first began covering media in the early 1980s, most marketing spending beancounters understood that "below-the-line" marketing already was twice as big as the above-the-line one: ad-supported
media. Within the below-the-line universe was things like PR, direct marketing, and consumer and trade promotion, which all have taken on new forms in the digital universe, including retail media, but
they're just new names -- and often new players -- doing what marketing has always done. My question, is how much is the newly defined category of "retail media" competing with, or incremental to the
rest of the ad-supported media marketplace?
- KPIs, outcomes, etc., etc., etc. Perhaps the most fundamental shift I've observed in the way media is planned,
bought, sold and measured is the business objectives used to define the ROAS (return on ad spending). The simple description is that we've shifted from long-term brand-building attributes like brand
lift, awareness, recall, consideration, affinity, etc. to short-term ones like conversations, sales, opt-ins, etc. The truth is, it was never binary and both long- and short-term outcomes are
important for brand marketers, but as the ad-supported media industry increasingly shifts to "outcome-based" metrics and measures, I for one sure hope they don't throw the baby out with the bath
water.
- Contextual vs. behavioral. Needless to say, this relates to the outcomes debate as well, but there's a separate debate about whether it's better to
target consumers based on their personal identity data and behaviors, or on the media they are using. While the deprecation of cookies and device identity trackers has accelerated this debate and
contextual recently has experienced a resurgence because of it, it seems to me that the industry remains committed to identity/behavioral-based targeting and that it's just gone from a passive means
of acquiring it (dropping browser cookies and devices IDs) to an active opt-in model managed by brands, agencies, platforms and media companies all claiming to have the best, most privacy-compliant
and ethical identity spines. Not to mention a burgeoning cottage industry of data cleanrooms who can mix and match all those sources of data to achieve optimum "identity resolution." Is this really
what consumer advocates and regulators intended, how long will the identity spine marketplace sustain itself until there is a new spate of regulation? And what will the role of contextual targeting be
within it?
- Media decentral. The sideshow of decentralized Web3 models, the blockchain, and consumer data sovereignty may seem like some unneeded noise for
planners and buyers, but to those leading the charge, it promises to be every big as transformational as HTML was to the formation of the current digital media marketplace. Sure there's a lot of hype
and speculation -- particularly among crypto hedgers -- but there are some fundamentally new ways of thinking about how consumers and brands will interact within some of these new models. This one may
be too hot for a fruitful Planning & Buying Insider Summit debate, and in my humble opinion, is deserving of its own, separate show. But at the very least it would be interesting to see how some
traditional media thinkers think about the implications for a decentralized media marketplace controlled by individual users, or new custodian platforms, as well as some likely Trojan horses that
emerge along the way.
- Information asymmetry and misaligned incentives. I probably sound like a broken record by now, but truly believe these are the two most
important ad industry issues identified by the Association of National Advertisers in last year's transparency reports. And for what it's worth, I don't see how the sell-side and agency-side push to
create multiple new advertising currencies helps solve that problem, and I believe will only exacerbate it.
- The power of Babble (see above).
I have
more, and happy to publish a part II, if anyone wants to hear more about my ideas for fruitful planning and buying issues to debate, but this column was just intended to tease some responses from some
of you so I can help Smith finalize an agenda for a summit in Austin in September, and I look forward to debating some of them on stage with you there.