The Future of TV Advertising Global.

As someone who generally attends measurement and insight conferences it was refreshing to attend The Future of TV Advertising earlier this month and hear from across the industry representing big tech, broadcasters/streamers, CTV ad platforms, brand marketers, adland luminaries and media agencies, as well as measurement practitioners.

To borrow a phrase from Evan Shapīro , the shadow cast over TV by the 'Big Tech Deathstar' was clearly felt throughout the event as CTV ad platforms advocated for new ad formats to target the 'performance marketing' budgets that today fuel the likes of Google, Meta and more recently, TikTok too.

Peter Field gave an impassioned defense of TV advertising as a 'brand builder', evidenced by attention data from Amplified Intelligence and the IPA Effectiveness database which validates the role 15sec and 30sec TV advertising plays in long lasting memory building and therefore brand building.

It was a convincing argument but as the MC, Justin Lebbon from Adwanted put it, 'no one is talking about effectiveness in the US' and it does seem they've somewhat lost the battle.

ITV's Kate Waters argued that TV needed to fight back against Big Tech arguing who wants 'brand building when you can have sales?'. ITV intend to allow advertisers to buy 'outcomes' rather than 'audiences' as part of a shift to mid and bottom of the funnel marketing budgets and take the 'Big Tech Deathstar' head on. Other tactics discussed from a UK perspective was the possibilities of UK broadcasters joining forces so they 'compete on content but collaborate on everything else', which has some regulatory challenges but also may be a challenge technically and commercially.

A valid argument was made by Ian Whittaker from Liberty Sky Advisors who compared the mood in TV to that of Newspapers in the 2000s and 2010s whereby newspapers partnered with social media to provide social media with the one thing they didn't have - quality, professionally produced content, and in doing so handed over their client relationship and most of their advertisers spend too. Whittaker warned that TV is following a similar path with Paramount licensing content to TikTok to give TikTok the one thing the thing that holds advertisers back from investing more in TikTok, brand-safe, professionally produced content. Why could Paramount not create short-form content from their enviable back catalogue and bring this to audiences directly?

This attitude change was also highlighted by Nev Hasan of Foxtel Media in Australia who positions his company as a 'digital company' not a broadcaster, and coupled with this mindset change, advertising sales needs cross-media measurement data to support their needs and so updates from Barb Audiences and WFA were timely. Bandar AlSunbuly AlMashhadi and Mubin Khan of Media Ratings Company (MRC) in Saudi Arabia are pushing forward a full media measurement agenda covering broadcasting, streaming and moving into gaming, audio and ecomm too, with a plan to use trusted measurement as a growth driver for the Saudi media economy.

As someone I met at the event said, the traditional broadcasters need to understand they're not competing with each other, they're competing with Google. It seems that the message is getting through, but it's unclear how bright the future is for TV advertising; 2024 will be a big year.