In the emerging future of television advertising, many opportunities lay ahead on the high seas. But, on the horizon, do advertisers see islands, or new lands for settling?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, MTM co-founder and partner Jon Watts says the new-wave US TV market is leading the way in new capabilities – but, often, companies are racing ahead on their own, making it more difficult for ad buyers to easily place their money.
“In Europe… they’re all grappling with the challenge of scale, or rather the lack of it and there’s a real thrust in the market at the moment towards collaboration, partnership, joint ventures,” says Watts, whose London-based MTM is a research and strategy consultancy for the TV business.
“(In the US), you have a lot of very large businesses doing exciting things, but in many cases they’re doing very different things. The buy side, when I spend time engaging with it, will talk endlessly about the friction of dealing with multiple MVPD footprints, scale platforms like Roku and Samsung – all of them are doing exciting things individually, but they’re not all doing the same thing.”
Watts’ comment echoes those from executives who say giving advertisers a way to enjoy new techniques like TV targeting and advanced ad frequency capping at scale is a key imperative.
FreeWheel’s Joy Baer recently told Beet.TV: “We’re not always playing on the same team or paddling in the same direction.”
For his part, Watts can see where joint working has to happen.
“Trying to plan and execute a campaign nationally at scale, if you want to focus in on addressable, involves dealing with a lot of intermediaries and parties, and trying to attribute value to that campaign in a joined-up consistent way remains profoundly challenging,” he says. And that’s before we start thinking about linear multi-platform or TV Everywhere and digital video.
“I sometimes think that Europe is like Switzerland; its very collaborative. America, I think, has lots of buckets of collaboration, but sometimes the industry is at risk of losing sight of the big picture.
“(Its about) ‘what should we be doing collectively as an industry?’ as opposed to in groups or consortia or small sort of pockets that are working very well, doing great stuff, but they’re doing different stuff.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
