A weekly round-up of the industry’s top stories and research curated by the ARF.
Panel: Catharine Hays (The Wharton School); Natasha Hritzuk, Ph.D. (Turner Ignite); Sheri Roder (Horizon Media); Audrey Steele (FOX Network Sales); Howard Shimmel (Turner Broadcasting System)
The biggest obstacle to achieving this vision is measurement. Past measurement methods, have been product focused. Think about both the product and the impact on the consumer.
Digital platforms are behind the growing trend in the TV industry to reduce commercial time. Overall TV commercial loads overall are still increasing. According to an analysis by Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser, national ad loads rose 3.9% year over year in January to 11 minutes per hour.
“TV viewing is increasingly happening on connected TVs—75% of NBCUniversal’s digital ad impressions are delivered that way—where the ad load is lower,” said Mark Marshall, EVP of Entertainment Ad Sales for NBCUniversal.
The ad industry’s standards body considers toughening the requirements to call digital ads “viewable” so they’re more comparable with TV and other media.
The Media Rating Council on Tuesday issued a call for research to help gauge what would happen, for example, if it required “viewable” ads to appear on screen in full instead of the current standard of halfway. It also wants to look at “duration weighting,” or varying standards above its current 1 second for display ads and 2 seconds for video.
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Editor’s Note: These are excerpts from a Q&A with Publicis’ Rishad Tobaccowala and WARC’s Commissioning editor for Best Practice, Lena Roland
LR: In February, you said that “we’re going to, increasingly, have less and less advertising,” what will take its place? How will brands communicate with new—and current—consumers?
One of the most important objectives for any brand is share of voice, but when it comes to smart speakers, brands may be losing theirs. According to just-completed research from comScore, smart speakers represent a new threat to brand loyalty.
Among the findings: smart speakers recommended a brand other than the one the consumer was trying to order through the device.
“When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” said Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos in 2016. “Mozart in the Jungle”, an Amazon co-production, free on-demand for Amazon Prime members, won the Best TV Comedy Globe that year. Reuters.
According to new findings, more than 23 million adults in the U.S. have used a smartphone to listen to a podcast in the past month. Nielsen.
Rob Roy, Chief Digital Officer at Sprint: “We believe data is our oil, our gold, but having hundreds of millions of terabytes of data that isn’t actionable really does nothing for me.” Think with Google.
The ARF was invited to an event at which Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School and Kumar Mehta, consultant, prior Microsoft, and author of “The Innovation Biome”, discussed their views on innovation, especially the role of innovation at “the big four, maybe five”, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Their conclusions:
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Editor’s Note: Last week we covered NBC’s approach to reducing commercial clutter and their creating new ad formats.
AdAge comments on the consequences if Fox reduced ad loads to two minutes per hour in the next two years—it would have to make up the lost ad revenue somehow. Fox today sells much more commercial time—10.6 minutes per primetime hour in January, for example, according to Pivotal Research Group. At that estimated upfront price of $300,000 for a spot in “Empire,” 10.6 ad minutes would mean $6.4 million for Fox.
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The quality of research will improve, and this will generate a bigger corpus of knowledge… creative people will learn to exploit this… thereby improving their strike rate at the cash register.
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1983
As a strong believer in research, David Ogilvy’s insight is right in step with today. For this and other reasons, our award is in his name.
Join us as the ARF honors this year’s most brilliant advertising campaigns and all of the people behind them at the David Ogilvy Awards.
The award ceremony will take place on Wednesday, March 28 in NYC during CONSUMERxSCIENCE.
Visit thearf.org/event/2018-arf-david-ogilvy-awards to view the finalists.
Over 60% of female consumers believe women are commonly depicted using negative stereotypes in ads, research conducted by A+E Networks has found.
Joetta Gobell, A+E Networks’ VP, Primary Research, Ad Sales, and Strategic Insights, discussed a variety of studies it has undertaken with girls and women. “Sixty-three percent of the women that we spoke to agreed that there are more negative stereotypes about women in advertising than there are positive. They’re very much saying, ‘that’s a frustration for me’… And we didn’t see significant difference in that across race and ethnicity,” Gobell reported.
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