Media Bytes
June 19, 2008
A Defining Year for TV
Marketers need flexibility, and that means in-pocket beats upfront.
By Tom Stolfi and Gail Ettinger
If you stayed out of the upfront, here’s the good news: From now into 2009, you will be able to do as well—if not much better—in scatter. What’s more, the flexibility you gained beats the price fix you passed up—particularly if you’re a middle-market advertiser (the majority of marketers, with less than $50 million budgets).
The 2008-2009 season will not go down as a great season in network TV advertising. The Olympic torch only lights up August. The new fall shows aren’t wowing critics. The estimated $3 billion in political advertising is largely local. And those fourth-quarter ad budgets aren’t going to hold up in a sputtering economy. Pressure is already building to trim spending on anything whose sales aren’t intimately tied to the holiday season.
That means cancellations will create greater availabilities at opportunistic prices. Brands in-pocket will have more flexibility to create truly effective campaigns.
What’s more, you need the flexibility. Everything about marketing is moving toward real-time, from when products are made to how they’re distributed to when budgets are approved. You need the flexibility, not just to update the focus of TV buys, but to spread the money out over the combination of media options that will work best on a monthly basis.
Media is a marketing tool. We need to view and manage it through a business lens, not an advertising lens. A big 2008 upfront buy works against this. What happens when those fourth-quarter cuts hit—but the brand is locked into network commitments made because someone panicked about being frozen out of prime time? In many cases, more appropriate media for the moment gets cut from the plan to preserve a broadcast campaign whose impact is increasingly questionable.
Businesses need marketing to connect with people in all the media they engage, from TV to online to place-based vehicles. Most brands need TV in different doses; some don’t need TV at all. What looks like fragmentation through the media lens is concentration from a business standpoint: the opportunity to zero in on particular customer segments with a precise communication.
There’s more to value than cost. This year, the same old panic poured $9 billion into TV commitments in three days. That thinking serves agencies and networks, and traps advertisers into a cost model. The standard objection of higher prices in scatter betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of value. Value is creating something that is so focused on the target audience that every dollar pulls. A brand’s “most expensive” buy can be its cheapest if every dollar delivers the right audience. Today, no one can prove value in any upfront dollar.
No one can afford waste, particularly not the smaller and mid-sized brands (A catch: Fortune 500 advertisers are really collections of smaller brands.). Fortunately, there is a better way: strategy anchored in the realities of a marketer’s business, not logistics of the media.
Clients’ business realities are more moment-to-moment than ever before. Realistic media strategy mirrors the pace of the consumer market, not the “media market”—so marketers can see clearly whether the media mix is generating sales, then pick out the underperforming components and tweak in real time.
Brands that work this way can outmaneuver much larger competitors whose budgets are locked up. When the upfront media underdelivers, so will the makegoods; they’re what is left on the lot after scatter. So Goliath leaks money while David speeds along getting 100 miles per gallon.
This year’s upfront is indeed a defining one. It’s drawing the line between media-centric and customer-centric approaches to media. We’re going to see the marketplace redrawn along value lines, and we’re going to find out which agencies are true marketing partners.
Tom Stolfi is executive vp, corporate media director at KSL Media, and Gail Ettinger is executive vp, national broadcast at KSL Media. They can be reached at tstolfi@kslmedia.com and gettinger@kslmedia.com, respectively.