As the “battle of the titans” in streaming television rages on, advertising won’t be going away anytime soon, according to MediaLink’s Michael Kassan. “I think it’s going to have to find its level,” the Chairman & CEO says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2019 Digital Content NewFronts. “I think it has to be reimagined.”
At the NewFronts, strategic advisory firm MediaLink teamed with YouTube for a kickoff breakfast and discussion that included Tara Walpert Levy, VP of agency and brand solutions at Google and YouTube.
Referring to the ever-rising competition among streaming TV providers, Kassan observes, “there are peoples’ careers who depend on it and there are companies that are looking at it as their future, and there’s a lot of barbarians at the gates right now.”
He notes that after Disney announced Disney+, Wall Street’s reaction was to push the stock of the Walt Disney Co. “to an all-time high.” Similarly, WarnerMedia has “an amazing existing franchise with HBO and extending that and bringing Bob Greenblatt to the party I think is going to make a big statement,” Kassan adds in a reference to the recently appointed Chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment.
He says Comcast and its NBCUniversal juggernaut “are certainly not to be counted out but very much in the middle of it. Not to underestimate YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix “and you just go on and on. You’ve got billions and billions of dollars being spent against the backdrop of creating content, and the consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for that content.”
As for the prospects for advertising spending on television amid all the groundbreaking change, some question whether marketers that can’t spend money the way they traditionally have done “are just going to put that to their bottom line. We know that’s not the case because you still need to market your goods and services. I think it has to be reimagined. It’s not going to be the way it was, that’s for sure, but it will still exist and it will still thrive.”
