Dipping into TV of Tomorrow Live (TVOT) for one last session, how could we possibly resist a panel teasingly called Pandemic Experiments?
Some dramatic changes in viewing habits have been easier to correlate and explain than others over the past year – prompting experimentation around audience measurement and advertising as the focal point of discussion.
What has surprised Comscore’s Chief Research Officer, Michael Vinson, most during the pandemic is the different time scales. In the early days of lockdowns, the US measurement company observed a quick increase in viewing as expected. Then, as time went on, Comscore started to notice differentiation of viewing habits by geography. Through summer and fall 2020, as Covid-19 infections ebbed and flowed, Vinson highlighted New York as an area where TV viewing followed these patterns of infection rates, while there was much less correlation between infection rates and video consumption when moving down into the South Atlantic States area – the implication being that different areas responded very differently to the virus.
While Vinson didn’t speak explicitly about experimentation on Comscore’s part, he took his TVOT opportunity to preach how the industry must transition from the “battle days” where untransparent, undisclosed tracking is the norm, to getting into an ethical relationship with consumers. Vinson is under no illusion about the responsibility of measurement firms like Comscore to respect privacy and help drive change in the bigger data abusers like Facebook, citing ditching third-party cookies as one starting point.
WarnerMedia’s pandemic experimentation really goes without saying, letting HBO Max loose into the streaming landscape 11 months ago. However, WarnerMedia’s Beth Rockwood, despite being SVP of Ad Sales Research at WarnerMedia, had very little to say on advertising experimentation, instead praising the management decision to release theatricals direct to HBO Max as the most disruptive and experimental move.
Disruptive it certainly was, but with AT&T preparing to launch an ad-supported premium version of HBO Max some time next month, clearly Rockwood’s appearance on the panel came a couple of months too soon as her lips were sealed on anything and everything advertising and audience measurement.
Meanwhile, a huge comeback for silver tech (aka any technology used by the baby boomer generation born between 1946 and 1964), was monitored by audience testing company GlobalWebIndex (GWI), which was represented by GM Carrie Seifer. Diving into the data revealed that Gen Z and Millennial streaming figures were actually flat during Covid-19 peak months, streaming as much during the pandemic as they did before, while it was the baby boomers that saw the greatest uptick. Given that baby boomers make up approximately 24% of the US population, any brands who pivoted to target silver tech were brands that prospered.
Alcohol is a great example. GWI noticed a direct correlation between alcohol consumption and the strictness of a country’s lockdown, allowing brands to take advantage of the reduction in brand loyalty triggered by lockdowns. “This really popped with alcohol brands because of frictionless consumption – aka I can now get it online,” said Seifer.
On the topic of personalization, Seifer scorned the industry for doing a poor job at representing people correctly – citing a survey in which only 9% of consumers felt they had been correctly represented in advertising. This percentage is even lower for ethnic minorities. Her advice was for brands to tap into things that reflect a person’s heritage such as music and food.
GWI had a tough decision to make during Covid-19 that Seifer believes paid off – giving some of its data-based services away completely free based on the notion that society as a whole became GWI’s customer base.
Representing the sell-side ad platform industry was Adam Lowy, Head of Sales and Strategy at Magnite, who mentioned experimenting with addressable ads without really going into any detail. Q4 saw a nice rise in interactive advertising on connected TVs from Magnite’s observations – seeing demand from advertisers actively wanting to understand engagement on a one-to-one relationship level with the consumer.
That said, Eric Cavanaugh, SVP of Cross-Platform Media Intelligence at Publicis Media, drilled down to the local TV station level which became an even more invaluable resource for US viewers as Covid-19 took hold. Lockdowns sent Publicis Media back to the drawing board, where it decided that changing habits meant the supply and demand model didn’t make sense anymore. The French multinational advertising group started exploring local ordinance rules, such as whether restaurants were allowed to open in certain states – trying to understand behaviors beyond the traditional metrics of supply and demand.
“How many ads shifted to public service announcements or station promos because advertisers didn’t know what the messaging should be?” he pondered, rhetorically.
We came to TVOT’s Pandemic Experiments session expecting exclusive glimpses under the hood of what media R&D departments have been working on during the pandemic, but left feeling that the audience measurement community is still flapping around trying to figure out what just happened.