VIA BEETCAM– How do we reallocate advertising money when major tentpole events are taken out of the buying schedule? In a BeetCam interview, Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of Simulmedia, explains that it’s going to take a massive industry shift to move away from a calendar that relies on live events.
The macro change that will take place in the TV industry will be massive dislocations and reallocations of billions of dollars worth of media advertising spend over the course of the next number of months. This doesn’t mean that digital companies will be the winners and everyone else will lose. Rather, the steps that people and companies take right now will be a determining factor of their ability to stay afloat.
“Historically, we find that the companies that become the most myopic, that focus on how to just get through today, how to just get through this week, will find themselves running out of steam in a couple months as fatigue sets in,” Morgan says.
Those companies that are able to take a longer and more measured view will likely be successful. There could be unique business opportunities to come from the pandemic, too. Morgan said that Simulmedia has never been as busy as they have been the past two weeks. This is because there has been a general growth around advanced advertising and there have been significant cancellations in live sports, so billions of advertising dollars that were allocated for sporting events now cannot run.
“That advertising needs to happen,” Morgan said. “They need to create that awareness among those consumers to be able to meet their business goals.”
Simulmedia has spent much of their time the past few weeks redeploying money that was targeted to sports viewers so that advertisers could still hit those audiences. Morgan believes that this industry disruption is due to the advertising schedule being traditionally built off of tentpole events like March Madness and other large live events.
“We’re not going to be able to find audiences based on old truisms of types of content and types of programming,” Morgan says. “We’re going to have to rely on data, we’re going to have to rely on analytics, we’re going to have to rely on automation, we’re going to have to show advertisers real transparency. This is going to ultimately fracture infrastructure processes that were sort of baked in concrete over decades.”
Morgan believes it’s important to calm his employees in the short term, but more crucial to look ahead and explore what they will be doing in the third and fourth quarter of 2021 and 2022 and get prepared for the long haul.
“How the media industry responds, how we are able to deliver news, information, how we’re able to deliver entertainment programming to help people through this is going to be important, and that’s going to be paid for with advertising. We’re going to have to find ways to make this work,” Morgan says.
This video was recorded remotely using the #BeetCam
