This ain’t no papercut.
Roughly 6.6 million United States households will cut the cord this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast on pay TV trends, released Monday. That’s a 7.5% year-over-year decline, the biggest drop eMarketer has observed.
And the picture doesn’t get much rosier for broadcast TV.
By 2024, more than one-third of all US households will have canceled their pay TV subscriptions, and fewer than half will still be shelling out for a cable package.
“It’s an acceleration of an existing trend,” Eric Haggstrom, a forecasting analyst at eMarketer, which is now a part of Insider Intelligence.
Unbundled
The more obvious trends driving this decline are pandemic-induced increases in streaming consumption combined with access to exclusive streaming content, cable package price sensitivity and the loss of live sports during the first half of the year.
But there’s more to the story, Haggstrom said.
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by John Sabella, CTO at PubMatic.
As Google Chrome slowly dribbles out concepts for a cookieless future with little structure, many media buyers in the industry are getting restless to have a common solution that will be both privacy-compliant and standardized.
As a result, brands and leading advertiser coalitions including the ANA, 4A’s and IAB formed the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) in early August.
The advertisers and advertising consortiums in the partnership want a standardized, privacy-compliant solution without relying on a huge company with its own motivations. This means that companies in the open web are going to be expected to adopt standards dictated by advertisers, not just Google.
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Planning for 2021? Break out your blindfolds and your dartboards. This week on AdExchanger Talks, Ebiquity’s North America lead, Jed Meyer, discusses how marketers are handling the uncertainty of this moment.
“The theme you hear from our broad client base is the need to be more agile and to be more responsive,” Meyer says. “In the early days of the pandemic, the premium among all advertisers was looking for flexibility amid the uncertainty. They didn’t know if this was going to last for a few weeks or a few months. We’ve gotten out of that and now brands are adjusting.”
One big example of adjusting is advertisers booking less media far in advance. Brands still want the flexibility afforded by short-term media planning.
But first-tier inventory such as tentpole events, sports sponsorships, takeovers and custom engagements, are still being booked early in guaranteed deals.
“From a negotiating point of view, the publishers still have a fair amount of influence to control that [premium] inventory,” Meyer says. “When you move outside those environments, that’s when you get more flexibility and the ability to be more optimistic.”
"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Allison Schiff, senior editor at AdExchanger. It's part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger's editorial team.
The ad industry is facing a pair of interrelated existential threats: government regulation and policy changes coming from Google and Apple.
Putting aside the fact that the writing has been clearly on the wall, and largely ignored, for years, these threats have transformed from disquieting specs on the horizon (that’s not tech standards-related wordplay) into looming realities.
But it’s the moves being made by the platforms, rather than privacy regulations, that pose the larger and more immediate challenge to the digital advertising community.
When a law is passed, the sky doesn’t immediately fall, because laws need to be enforced and clarified. Regulators, which are often underfunded, understaffed and time-constrained, take on the former, and the court system handles the latter.
A regular cadence of enforcement actions and court cases helps to interpret the law as it’s put into practice, and companies also have the opportunity to argue their case.
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Trump Okays TikTok-Oracle Deal
Looks like TikTok will stay operational in the United States. On Saturday, President Donald Trump said he supported a deal in principle between TikTok and Oracle, Reuters reported. Under the deal, TikTok will be based in the United States - “possibly in Texas” - and owned by a company called TikTok Global. Oracle will take a 12.5% stake and store its user data in the interests of national security. Walmart gets a 7.5% stake. (No word on the valuation of those stakes, though.) As one of Reuter’s sources points out, China-owned ByteDance still hangs onto 80% of TikTok Global. However, considering that US investors own 40% of ByteDance, technically TikTok Global will be majority-owned by US investors, once you toss in the Oracle and Walmart stakes. So in total, US investors will own about 53% of TikTok Global.
Roku And NBCU Make Nice
Peacock will be available on Roku devices after all. The two companies made the deal on Friday, according to Variety. Also, the 46 NBCU broadcast and cable apps that NBCU threatened to pull off Roku during the dispute will remain. Terms weren’t disclosed, though Variety said NBCU will provide some quid pro quo to Roku, which Roku described as “a meaningful partnership around advertising.” NBCU said 15 million people have signed up for Peacock since it launched nationally in July and, in a statement, added: “Roku’s incredible reach will not only help us ensure Peacock is available to our fans wherever they consume video but continue to expand NBCUniversal’s unrivaled digital presence across platforms.”
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The TikTok saga continues.
The New York Times reports that Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat will be removed from all United States app stores (all two of them) starting Sunday, Sept. 20, as per an executive order from the Trump administration issued Friday morning.
Read the full executive order from the Commerce Department.
The order will bar Apple and Google from making TikTok and WeChat available to US users for download in the App Store and the Play Store. WeChat will no longer be able to process or transfer funds in the United States beginning Sunday.
If TikTok is unable to assuage the government’s national security concerns by Nov. 12, the same restriction will go into effect for its operations. (None of this affects users or business transactions outside of the United States.)
But what does all this fanfare mean for advertisers?
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Eliminating arbitrage will become even more important after Apple implements its IDFA changes.
Realistically, anywhere from 30% to 80% of a publisher’s traffic is being arbitraged, said Nathan Levin, CEO and founder of Mobile UA Ltd., a one-man consultancy he founded in 2018 to help developers navigate the mobile ecosystem’s complexities and tripwires. His clients include a large banking app and several Fortune 500 companies.
“Going direct to an advertiser gives you a huge advantage, and that will be especially true post-IDFA, because advertisers and developers won’t be able to target high-end users through programmatic channels as easily as before,” Levin said.
The diminished feedback loop will drive down CPMs. But there’s one surefire way publishers can continue capturing that revenue: “Work directly with advertisers so you can continue to get a premium on your traffic.”
Levin spoke with AdExchanger.
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The Peacock Measures Its Feathers
Ah, there’s nothing that says autumn like the fresh scent of outcome-based measurement on TV! NBCU now has a proprietary program called Total Investment Impact that tracks how ads drive sales, reports Digiday. The program also looks at how other, non-ad-related factors might impact sales. For instance, with Honda, the first advertiser testing the measurement system, NBCU looked at four years of data around gas prices, interest rates and car registrations. Of course, NBCU needed to pull third-party data to incorporate all of those insights. But, as Digiday writer Tim Peterson asks, how is Total Investment Impact different from standard media mix modeling? According to NBCU, it provides greater insight into the performance of its inventory specifically. NBCU has hawked its ability to measure business outcomes for almost two years and, in early 2019, sold its first TV ad campaign based on that metric.
Streaming Wars? Streaming Woos
Every major traditional television network – and its mother (and its mother’s mother) has launched a streaming service to feed the growing consumer need for video on-demand content. But while blood is being shed in the streaming wars, there’s a more covert battle being waged, according to Forrester principal analysts Jim Nail and Andrew Hogan. Streamers expect a perfect consumer experience that puts them totally in control and that just, well, works. “Content will get consumers to try a streaming app, but experience will keep them watching or paying a subscription fee,” Nail and Hogan write in a new report examining the state of play for US streaming media apps. Hulu and Disney Plus, for example, offer great functionality and clean, visually attractive UX design, while Netflix lags on the user experience front. Consumers expressed disappointment in Netflix’s much-lauded personalized recommendations because they found them to actually be not personalized enough.
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Although the Department of Justice never comments publicly on pending litigation, leaks from sources in-the-know suggest an antitrust case against Google could come as soon as the end of this month.
But there are many different ways this could go down.
It’s been roughly one year since the DOJ began its investigation. Here’s a breakdown of different scenarios that could play out as the Justice Department pursues antitrust charges against Google.
Fast track
Career politicians and prosecutors are strongly motivated to pursue cases that give them the best chance of getting reelected, reappointed and/or that win them political points.
A high-profile anticompetition case against Google would fit that bill – literally.
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