The digital ad world sees audiences and content as fully fungible across times of day, sources of distribution, or by geographic footprint. The TV ad world does not -- still -- and that hurts TV
media owners in their ability to maximize the yield on their premium video audiences.
TV ad buying and selling has historically been very siloed, whether by distribution format
(broadcast versus cable), daypart (prime-time versus sports versus daytime) or geographic coverage (national versus local). Not only have there been different buyers and sellers working on different
floors or in different cities or buildings for each silo subset, but frequently entirely different companies handle each of them for the same clients or same media owners. What may have had a sense of
justifiability during TV advertising’s “domination era,” from the 1970s through the early 2000s, makes absolutely no sense today.
It has always amazed me that local TV
companies didn’t proactively work with national cable TV programmers to stitch their audiences together in true data-driven ways to create a 1+1=3 or 4 value for national advertisers.
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Yes, in the planning phase many agencies may have taken into account audience delivery to be achieved across their national and local campaigns on a demographics and gross ratings point basis --
but this was never done very precisely. As we all know, what is planned on TV always looks quite different than what is ultimately bought.
But if media sellers do it proactively, they can not
only deliver a superior solution to advertisers and agencies, they can capture the added value in premium pricing. That is what digital companies would do.
Of course, there have been
consortias and reps that combined national and local inventory pools, but like agencies, this has typically been based on media weights, not targeted audiences and outcomes. Plus, as we know,
consortias tend to be great at getting industry trade headlines, but they rarely move mountains.
If you look at the Nielsen Gauge numbers, local broadcast has held its audiences relatively
well these past years as national cable numbers have plummeted. It has certainly helped broadcasters that their product can be viewed free and has been supplemented this past decade with free
over-the-air diginets tuneable on most smart TV sets today.
Today, every local broadcaster should be looking at how it can better penetrate the national TV ad market, not just by building a
“carve” of spots from each of their markets available in a combined package, but planned, activated and measured in combination with complimentary delivery on national television channels
to deliver the most efficient, effective and valuable campaigns possible for those advertisers.
What can we lose? We all know how much local broadcast inventory is under-utilized.
Strategically packaging it into national campaigns on an audience and outcome-defined basis could drive significant incremental revenues, margins and profits.
What do you think?