Change Was in The Air At TVB

It was hard not to notice the main theme of this year’s TVB event: the changes the TV industry has long been anticipating are finally starting to happen. That’s both exciting and scary, as everyone, from advertisers and ad agencies to TV networks and their ad sales teams needs to adjust to this new reality.

There was a lot of talk about how addressable was going to affect local broadcasters. How MVPDs were coming together to sell their inventory (the two to three minutes each hour they get from the networks), and how ATSC 3.0 was finally happening and how it was going to change the way local broadcast was sold, giving stations the opportunity to sell every spot on an addressable basis.

There was much talk about data and the power of knowing who your viewers actually were. How that could fuel both addressable ad buys and make it easier to automate selling. A growing understanding that automating sales freed up reps to concentrate on more important matters (like landing even more clients) and how new automated buying systems allowed for greater customization and transparency, so that stations no longer felt like they were handing over their inventory to a faceless machine.

OTT was also on everyone’s lips—both as an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is for existing broadcast stations to launch their own OTT apps and how the rising growth in acceptance of ad-supported OTT meant there was now ample inventory and an entire ecosystem to support those sales. 

And a threat, because stations that dragged their feet on moving to OTT could get left behind, the feeling that whether they launched their own apps or just signed on with one of the new vMVPDs, like Hulu Live TV or YouTube TV, getting on board the OTT bandwagon was suddenly more a question of “when” rather than “if” and if the answer wasn’t “now”, it might already be too late.

The move to OTT can also seem scary because it involves learning a whole new language, a whole new way of buying and selling and measuring advertising. There’s much opportunity there for broadcasters, though as with any new technology, the initial foray can be more than a little unsettling, leaving you feeling that you’ll never quite figure it out.

Until of course, you do.

Finally, there was talk of changes in the way TV is measured, how ACR data from smart TVs, which tracks the viewing of millions of actual viewers, is being used to create a measurement technique known as multitouch attribution, and how that’s being used to prove the effectiveness of TV advertising. 

That latter piece of news was well received in an industry that’s been getting battered by digital competitors with better and more complete data. With multitouch attribution, local broadcasters will be able to show how TV spots moved their clients’ customers through the sales funnel and provide concrete evidence of their effectiveness.

Change Is Now

We are living through a period of massive technological change and the TV industry is not immune to those changes. But change is not necessarily bad—played correctly by incumbents, it can be a positive thing, allowing them to tap into hidden strengths and expand their current positioning. 

The most important thing, as speaker after speaker reminded us, is to keep an open mind and embrace the pieces that will work for you.