The Role of Total Video Planning Plays in Upfronts

It’s Upfronts week and here we are again. After a successful NewFronts it’s time for the other biggest media companies to talk content and advertising innovation. On a parallel track, the price conversations between the buyers and sellers have also started. The upfront dance has begun—it hasn’t been killed off. In fact, far from it. This way of doing business is still quite useful for all sides of the ecosystem. It seems that everyone wants in on it.

The industry is keenly watching as consumers continue to cut cords and increasingly adopt connected TV (CTV) and OTT as their preferred viewing options, making the task of reaching prospects even harder to do now as there is more fragmentation and exceedingly more complexity.

This quickly evolving video ecosystem leaves the marketplace looking very different heading into the 2022/2023 Upfronts. How will advertisers navigate it? Do they have the necessary technology to manage this complexity?

Navigate this brave new world

The entire landscape has changed. Where you used to have a playing field dotted with the giant boulders of linear TV networks and scattered with CTV and OTT options among the dunes, you now have an oasis of traditional linear TV alongside digital streaming video and social media. Taking the metaphor a step further, you have new hybrid programming fitting easily between connected devices and mobile screens, creating redundancies and potential waste for buyers.

How do you locate and engage audiences now? How do you understand where they will go and how to reach them?

“Today’s planning tools were built for a different era and are ill-equipped to solve our present needs.”

Is anyone truly equipped to operate effectively in this brave new world?

This more complex environment means you can’t get around without technology to help navigate through it. Technology that helps forecast consumer viewing patterns across an entire video landscape, as well as taking into account heavy TV viewers, light TV viewers, cord-cutters, cord-nevers, etc. to better control media spend. And, of course, technology that reaches advertisers’ desired audience segments, in the proportion that they want.

Today’s planning tools were built for a different era and are ill-equipped to solve our present needs. Too much has changed. The future does not fit into the containers of the past.

To achieve success, you will need a total video strategy that is different and is purpose-built to solve the next generation of challenges. One that has the ability to optimize and analyze media holistically with an eye toward the future. The strategy also needs to be able to score linear TV KPIs with those of CTV, digital video and mobile in order to give buyers a birds-eye, 360-degree topographical map of the media landscape. It’s an approach that swaps siloed planning and buying with true incrementalism, delivering a more effective use of client’s budgets and reclaims control from the sell-side alone (as they look only within their portfolio) and allows buyers to make holistic decisions across their entire video portfolio.

Drive incrementally

Look at it this way: Linear and mobile are parts of an ecosystem with interactive micro-environments that can expand advertisers’ reach. Total video planning and investment can eliminate the redundancy and waste advertisers experience when these environments overlap.

Implementing total video planning technology—which incorporates a smart approach to data that effectively forecasts viewership across TV, CTV, digital and social media, unifying it on one platform and driving incrementality—is a true cross-screen planning solution.

Avoid being smart in a silo

Ironically, 2020-2021 proved to be a time of fast and positive development in the video world; people cut cords in record numbers and turned from cable boxes to streaming.

Meanwhile, the network’s technical teams were busy developing platforms to capture viewing data even as it moved toward hard-to-capture media. But this is still siloed information. It’s good for networks to understand their own footprint, viewership, incrementality and overlap within their own world, but it does not enable advertisers to fully understand these same things to guide their overall investment strategy. Data in silos is still siloed investment and siloed decisioning.

This year, it is more important than ever that media buyers have access to multi-network, cross-screen, granular data unified on a single platform. Using technology to transform siloed data into holistic data will empower advertisers to take control of their overall investments. It will also allow them to reduce waste and drive the outcomes most important to them—across the entire ecosystem—as they approach the upcoming Newfronts and Upfronts. Data was a great first step, but without technology, it does not solve for siloed investment.

Unite the data; bridge the gaps

After negotiating the Newfronts and Upfronts, your media portfolio should not resemble a series of desert snapshots with boulders and sand dunes marked out in separate frames. You do not need to end up with a static photo book of your individual media investments. You should have a full 360, high-def picture of the entire video landscape; one that allows for a dynamic visualization of your plan and evolves as your plan unfolds throughout the year.

This article was originally published on AdWeek.

 

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