While ABC's "93rd Academy Awards" witnessed a slight lift overall in national ad revenues to $155.9 million, according to one estimate, Nielsen-measured viewership for the event turned sharply lower
-- down a big 58%.
What would it mean to your media mix model if you bought people instead of channels? Building out your media campaign with smart data and custom modeling instead of working from the top down. Cadillac
is doing just that with their current audience first approach.
As a QSR brand, White Castle was at the forefront of using social media to promote their restaurants, but they didn't stop there. The family owned company also extended its social prowess to their CPG
side of business. So when COVID hit, White Castle was well positioned to ride out the storm. Selecting influencers, creative concepts, personas, PR- - its marketing team flipped the traditional media
mix to elevate and leverage their message well beyond social.
How does a new CPG business stand out in the already saturated snack bar market? As building a brand within the grocery industry can prove challenging and expensive, Jimmy Bars' co-founder, Jim Simon,
tells us it's vital to not only differentiate oneself but be creative as well.
From March 15-April 18 of this year, average broadcast viewership had a steep 20% drop, with cable sinking 26%.
In this week's edition I offer some wide-ranging thoughts to set the stage for this year's marketplace.
After receding nearly 11% in 2020, so-called fast-moving consumer goods such as food and drink brands are poised to increase their ad spending over the next few years, albeit not so fast.
The good news is that coming out of a global pandemic, demand for many goods and services is expanding. The bad news is that inflation may be too, including for the cost of advertising goods and
services.
Media buyers surveyed by IAB at the end of Q1 now say digital video, including CTV/OTT, will take a 20% share of total media budget this year -- up from 13% in IAB's November 2020 survey. Linear TV's
average share of total is now 18%, versus 15% in November.
Millennials are often characterized as digital-first media consumers by Madison Avenue, but the just-released Spring 2021 edition of Harvard's annual Youth Poll finds that when it comes to accessing
news, local TV newscasts have the greatest reach. A third (33%) of the 18- to 29-year-olds responding to the survey, fielded in March, said they get their news or current events content from local TV
stations, putting the linear TV medium ahead of Facebook (30%) and all other digital and/or analog media platforms.
Persons with visual, hearing, speech and/or cognitive disabilities are active consumers of media, but they also have special needs, frequently utilize assistive tools to compensate, and often have a
difficult time with some of the most mainstream media, especially social media.
Major U.S. marketers appear to be streamlining their agency reviews, moving from an "unbundled" approach to consolidated media and creative account pitches, according to an analysis by advertising
accounts research firm Comvergence.
In a healthy leading indicator of the U.S. ad industry recovery, ad execs -- both advertisers and media planners and buyers -- say they are reviewing their ad budgets much less frequently than even
five months ago. The data, which comes from the IAB just-released update of an ongoing tracking report of ad executive confidence, shows that only 15% of respondents are reviewing their ad budgets
monthly vs. nearly double (29%) that amount when it last surveyed them in November 2020.
A top Wall Street analyst has ended a decade-long "outperform" rating for Interpublic, downgrading it to "market perform," the same rating currently bestowed on other publicly traded agency holding
companies.
According to the companies, the combined data assets will provide insights into the shopping habits of almost five billion consumers globally. The acquisition is also complementary to Kantar's U.S.
Ad Intelligence business.
Social media is the most difficult medium overall for persons with disabilities -- including visual, hearing, speech and cognitive ones -- to use. That's the finding of a study conducted by IPG
Mediabrands Magna, and is part of a report produced with sister unit IPG Media Lab.
Native ad formats including paid branded content and influencers now represent the biggest share of digital budgets, supplanting options such as paid search, display, social and video in the media
mix.
2021 is the year of experience for Google. YouTube doesn't seem to follow the same standard (completely), according to Searchmetrics data.
Netflix accounted for the top seven of 10 most in-demand original series.
The U.S. ad market expanded nearly 25% in March vs. the same month last year. Importantly, it was the best March since SMI began indexing the U.S. marketplace, and it was up 7.2% vs. March 2019, more
than making up for any erosion in 2020.
HBO Max's gains were driven by its debuting movies in sync with theater releases. Paramount+ and Discovery+ also showed strong growth, and Disney+ scored the period's two highest-rated series.
Much of this comes via ESPN and ABC -- the latter now shares in some of the NFL programming spoils, due to the new long-term contract.
But when it comes to music, 45% of consumers overall -- and 67% of Millennials -- say they would rather pay than have ads on their streaming service.
The share of desktop video ad impressions deemed risky soared 22% during the second half of 2020, according to the latest edition of Integral Ad Science's (IAS) "Media Quality Report."
By at least one important quality measure -- so-called "viewability" -- connected TV ads are the top of the digital food chain.
In response to the VAB's letter, Nielsen said in a statement late Friday: "We have been clear and transparent with the MRC and our clients on every change in protocol we needed to make during Covid to
keep our people and panelists safe.... A single third party audit is the best approach for the industry and we will work closely with the MRC on all audit requests." VAB president/CEO Sean Cunningham
issued a statement in response on Friday, saying: "Nielsen's refusal to take any type of action, in the face of a research-backed request from its key industry stakeholders, is profoundly
disappointing and a massive disservice to a TV marketplace that has had a stellar track record for collaboration and transparency."
Amazon's total video and music video spend for TV, movies, and other content for its Prime Video and other services rose 41% in 2020 to $11 billion, according to its annual report -- a level
rivaling other digital and legacy media companies. On a profit-and-loss basis, however, Amazon is still behind the bigger players. It grew 17% to $6.8 billion (from $5.8 billion in 2019) for its video
and music content.
Only 2% of media agency executives expect their connected TV (CTV) ad budgets to decline this year, while 86% say they will increase, 19% saying it will be "dramatic." Those are among the findings of
a survey of 177 U.S. media agency execs conducted by Pixability in February.
By a margin of more than two-to-one over its next-closest competitor, U.S. media agency execs say YouTube will be the biggest beneficiary of shifts from TV ad budgets into digital media during 2021.
In the first month to reflect a year-over-year comparison with the beginning of the COVID-19-related ad recession, national ad spending expanded 22% in March vs. the same month last year.