VIEQUES, PR – As Managing Director at MediaLink, Matt Spiegel attends more than his share of conferences and hears more than his share of jargon. So he’s heartened that much of the discussion at this year’s Beet.TV Executive Retreat was about business outcomes.
“We’re having the business impact conversation, which I think is great,” says Spiegel, who prefers to talk about metrics than “sausage making.”
It represents a tipping point of sorts, but only for media companies and marketers that fully understand “it’s about the consumer,” he adds. “One of the things that the industry often forgets is that we are chasing where consumers go.”
He cites as an example statistics showing a 50% year-over-year growth of watching television via connected devices like Roku and Chromecast. For Millennials, that represents about 10% of TV consumption in the 18-49 age cohort.
For marketers of consumer packaged-goods, automobiles and retail products, the viewing shift of younger consumers is something to which they need to adapt, according to Spiegel.
“I think what we’re finding is the industry is recognizing the need to catch up and that we’re pretty close to that tipping point,” he says.
Spiegel believes there are more investments being made in “the right things” on both the media seller and buyer side. If sellers don’t have a grip on understanding their audiences at scale and reaching audiences wherever they are, “You’re going to have a harder and harder time attracting the ad dollars you’re looking for.”
Marketers need to spend more time on measuring the way they reach audiences as opposed to just targeting them. “It’s easy to target new people, but if you’re not creating new measurement models, you’re not measuring new things, you’re going to miss that Millennial audience,” Spiegel says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
