Letting consumers opt in to engage with digital commercials in lieu of seeing a full pod of them is just “the tip of the spear” in the quest to replace frequency based advertising, says Fox Networks’ Joe Marchese. “This is where we’d like to end up. But between here and there, there’s a lot of better targeting of advertising based on who’s watching reducing ad loads and the new ad formats.”
In an interview with Beet.tv, Marchese traces the path to the current state of consumers and their tolerance—or lack thereof—of ads from a longstanding blind spot.
For too long, the TV industry “thought too little about what consumers want and just thought this was a negotiation that was happening between content owners and advertisers,” says Marchese, who is President of Advanced Advertising at Fox. “In reality, it was a three-party negotiation: content owners, advertisers and viewers.”
The last group have “fought back” as evidenced by the rise of ad blockers, DVR’s, Netflix, Hulu Ad-Free and other choices, according to Marchese.
He cites “the rash of virtual MVPD’s” like AT&T’s new streaming offerings and as he looks ahead to CES 2017, believes there’s no doubt that TV and video content will increasingly be delivered via IP.
“If that’s true and people are going to be logging in to watch television even on the big screen at home, what does that finally mean for advertisers?” Marchese posits. “How do we realize that?”
Among other things, he sees IP delivery fostering personalized ads and enabling advertisers to become “smarter about targeting and reduce ad loads because the ads get better and more relevant.”
To Marchese, creativity doesn’t always mean interactive ad design. “Sometimes it means designing different length commercials for different viewing experiences,” he says. “Sometimes it will mean designing sequential commercial messages.”
In an IP environment, “We know that a person has seen commercial one,” Marchese says. “Let’s show them commercial two now. That’s a whole new way to think about advertising than a simple reach and frequency.”
In any event, more consumer choices have put the market in a very different place. “Content owners and marketers are going to need to work together more than ever before,” says Marchese.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more vidoes from the series here.
