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| Another Kind Of On Demand |
I am the proud and loving father of a Millennial, a 15-year-old girl, and we have a couple of shows that we like to watch on demand. As my local cable provider has not monetized that advertising inventory to the same extent that they have “live” ads, the spots are for just a handful of providers, and are (very) repetitive. You also cannot skip through the ads, so you wind up seeing them a lot. It is a worse viewing experience than a live approach, but we are not the best on scheduling, and we do not own a DVR.
On some level, it seems silly to have any complaint about this at all. We did not schedule ahead, but we are still seeing the shows when we want. The tech to skip ads did not exist until my daughter’s lifetime, and when I was a child, skipping ads was either technologically impossible, or required the use of a VHS tape and careful fast-forwarding. Only in the lifetime of this child have we gotten to one-button escapes from this level of irritation. So do we smile when we encounter these likely CPA spots, and think, “Oh well, so much of what we watch doesn’t have these, so I guess it is completely fine that we are seeing these ads a lot”?
Well, um, no. Seeing how that reaction would be right up there with being thankful for smartphones when they drop a call.
My daughter’s hatred of these ads is strong enough that I reach for the mute button to limit the damage. I have even explained the nature of CPA/CPM ad buys, in an effort to try to take her “behind the curtain”, and share just how much better she has it than, well, me, when I was a kid. Mostly, I just try to mute the ad and change the subject by talking about the show we are watching. We talk, or she picks up her ever-present phone and distracts herself with other content.
I share this not to complain about my kid, or dwell on how media is doing a poor job at monetizing on demand programming. Instead, the point is to show how the technology changes the landscape, and how viewable does not equate to valuable. Every single spot from the on-demand presentation is 100% viewable. However, since 100% of the ads currently shown are not targeted to either my daughter, or myself, in terms of an ad buy, it is little better than black hat bot fraud. Since the last mile of relevant is broken, the spots are doing their advertisers more harm than good. (By the way, there are some very big providers at work on this issue. I will get to that later in the week.)
Beyond the waste… if my daughter or I were so inclined, we could reach a worldwide viral network of people with our mockery of the advertisers in question. Since we are both fans and occasional performers of stand-up comedy, it is possible, since a great source of material is to hit the stuff that everyone hates. Again, this 2-way and viral tech is new, and so is the changing world for the advertiser. A generation ago, an advertiser does not have this concern.
A final point about all of this, and something that everyone involved in marketing and advertising needs to know, deep in their bones… what we do *is* annoying. It may seem acceptable, because it is in a medium where it seems tolerated, or we work on campaigns with high budget and analysis of the creative. If we reach such a targeted list, or in a low visibility / complaint media, we might not ever receive personal blowback, but make no mistake about it. There’s a world filled with people who regard our work as ballast or worse, and would be very glad to be ad-free for the rest of their lives.
They do not believe that the amount that we pay for that exposure is what keeps the lights on for any number of publishers, brands and services. These deniers and degraders exist in every medium, from the people who claim to throw out all of their junk mail, to those who download ad blockers to run with their content in laptop and desktop, to those who DVR and skip everything or don’t watch, and so on, and so on.
As marketing and advertising pros, we can ignore this aspect of our work, or dwell on it, all we like. It is a matter of personal choice.
My choice is to view this as a transition phrase, and trust that tech and a free market will eventually produce a wonderful future of targeting solutions that make advertising safe, legal, and rare…
On the other hand, you can regard that as naïve, since advertising density has only gone in one direction, and expect this generation to eventually conform. They will accept your high frequency campaigns as the (free!) price to pay for preferred content. They will learn your branding, your jingle and your offer the same way that it has worked for decades. A strong creative execution and a saturation campaign to build brand and drive awareness.
However, if you are well and truly invested in that latter option, and cannot imagine things going in any other way?
You probably do not want to know how my Millennial finds out about, and listens to, new music.
Seeing as how that revenue stream also has changed irrevocably during her lifetime, and she is a lot more attached to the musicians she likes than the TV show she watches…
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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.
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