James Siciliano

Articles by James All articles by James

• Emotionally Intelligent Planning In An Era Of High Anxiety in Planning & Buying Insider on 05/28/2025
  

  From climate change and economic instability to digital overload and rising distrust in institutions, today's audiences aren't just distracted-they're emotionally saturated. Yet many marketers continue to rely on outdated assumptions: that reach equals resonance, or that a high click-through rate means a message connected. It doesn't.

Comments by James All comments by James

• Is There Value In 6-Second TV Spots? by Wayne Friedman (TV Watch on 09/01/2017)
  

  We have much to learn yet about recall effectiveness six second units.  However, as a rule of thumb, the six second units should be used when they make tactical sense as part of a mix with thirty second units.  Tell the story with thirty's and reinforce (enhance frequency) with six second units.  It's also critical that creative and media strategy be developed jointly.  Creative content must be both relevant to its target consumer as well as impactful.  Media placement must be target rich, and ideally, work with the creative. That said, the TV environment where the creative is placed will, in all likelihood, be "premium". T he goal here would be higher communication effectiveness (achievement of communication campaign goals) and greater ROI vs. lowest CPM.   

• Is Programmatic Ruining Advertising? by Cory Treffiletti (Media Insider on 07/19/2017)
  

  Absolutely Ed!  If ad content is not engaging to its intended target segment, it will not capture attention and recall will be negligible.  This is true in "traditional" media.  It is especially true in digital.  If an ad delivered on a digital platform is neither relevant nor engaging to its target, it will be ignored (thus wasted impressions).  It also runs the risk of being intrusive.  Thus the reason we have the issues we have with ad blocking.  

• Is Programmatic Ruining Advertising? by Cory Treffiletti (Media Insider on 07/19/2017)
  

  Ed, I agree with you 100%.  Let me add, the "promise" of Programmatic, going back four or five years, was actually much tighter placement in digital - "the right content for the right audience within the right environment at the right time".  Programmatic was to have provided actionable insights into both online and offline target consumer behaviors.  For the most part, this has been an abysmal failure.  Instead what we have is less control and less quality of placement for the sake of lower CPM.  The sad truth is, many marketers and their agency counterparts have no idea of what the "promise" of Programmatic was or is.  What we have (with a few exceptions) is merely automated RTB of tonnage predicated on the lowest CPM sometimes aided by very basic data as buying parameters.  

• Listen Up, Marketers: I'm Not My Father by Steve Sternberg (TV Everywhere on 10/12/2016)
  

  Steve, couldn't agree with you more.  Using pure gender/age demos for marketing and media buying should be relegated to the history books along with analogue television.  Effective targeting requires qualitative based targeting.  Factors such as lifestyle, worldview, product consumption along with type of target media consumption are key.  Anything other leads to missing the mark and a lot of wasted impressions.  As a media strategist I've been using qualitative data as the foundation for building plans for the last 16+ years.  Marketers and their agencies need to begin to negotiate media placement and costing based on qualitative parameters and scrap the use of pure gender/age demos - media sellers will need to accommodate this.  Another issue, as you've stated, is the stereotyping of "Boomers".  Truly, this segment's product consumption, media usage and lifestyle(s) are not those of their parent's. To not understand this and the purchase clout this segment has is a colossal mistake on the part of marketers.   

• Millennials Are NOT The Enemy by Cory Treffiletti (Online Spin on 03/30/2016)
  

  Well stated Cory!  Each generation has its own unique influences and emotional hot buttons.  Within each generation are an array of lifestyles and perspectives.  For a campaign to be truly effective, regardless of generation or segment, emotional connectedness is critical.  "Big database" is meaningless unless it is used to identify opportunities and ways to connect emotionally.  Indeed, data should be embraced accross disciplines to identify innovative ways to drive connectedness.  

• How Online Advertising Is Starting To Look Like TV In The '60s by Cory Treffiletti (Online Spin on 03/16/2016)
  

  Well stated Ed.  

• Agency Strikes New Kind Of Unwired Deal, A Step Toward Local Broadcast Programmatic by Joe Mandese (MediaDailyNews on 02/04/2016)
  

  Well stated Ed!  If I may, I'd like to add that the promise of Programmatic and Big Data is to enable marketers to target in a much more granular way.  The unwired network referenced in this article is no where near that.  Television, whether viewed on the "Big Screen" or mobile devices is NOT being viewed as it was five years ago, let alone back in the 1980s.  Today consumers watch specific TV content accross multiple devices.  This is especially true with younger consumers.  The concept of buying accross broad dayparts has become ineffective and with it comes a lot of waste.  Today, we need to focus on effectiveness and a high ROI as the measure of success for our clients vs. the lowest CPP/CPM on the block. 

• MediaCom To Track Emotions: Integrate Into Content, Media Planning by Joe Mandese (MediaDailyNews on 01/12/2016)
  

  @Costanza Scarpa...  EXACTLY!  Biometrics coupled with Social media metrics (e.g., Twitter) and perhaps more traditional databases that measure level of viewer engagement with Prime Time TV programming (for example) would make for extremely powerful planning tools. As a media strategist, these are the type of resources I use.  Being able to gauge consumer emotional response to content would take it even deeper.  After guaging emotional reciptiveness, appropriate media environment could be identified for placement/alignment with specific content in a "contextual" kind of way. All good stuff.   

• MediaCom To Track Emotions: Integrate Into Content, Media Planning by Joe Mandese (MediaDailyNews on 01/12/2016)
  

  Sounds as though MediaCom will be applying Biometrics to content that THEY produce (or have produced for them) and not necessarily used to measure emotional response to programming that the broadcast nets are running.  This adds a whole new demension to copy testing.  Could be a really viable tool to enhancing engagement with digital content.  

• Fear TV Displacement -- And Then Realize Everything Will Probably Be The Same by Wayne Friedman (TV Watch on 01/11/2016)
  

  The net of it all is that TV Content is TV Content is TV Content.  The most highly viewed "digital content" will be Premimum TV content... that content that is produced by the Networks or by producers that have agreements with the networks.  "Digtital video" will NOT replace TV. Alternate screens are becoming TV.  What's changing here is the WAY in which TV content is being viewed.  When you combine viewership of TV content viewed on linear TV with TV content being viewed on digital platforms, what you get is more TV content being consumed than ever before. 

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