A Fragmented Media Landscape and Big Swings Back to Brand from Performance

Speakers: Katie Flynn, Bob Burch

Hello. Welcome to the podcast.

I know.

I’m very excited to have you. Well, we’re going to have you next week too. We’re going to talk some more specific topics, but this week I know we want to dive into just some general stuff that’s happening with media, which media is an interesting topic because I think it is so ever-changing.

I know you’ve been doing a lot of talking with clients specifically in the last couple of months about where things are heading. So we’ll just dive right in there and maybe start with what are the changes that you’re seeing from a media landscape perspective?

Yeah, so I mean, I’ve been in this space for about 20 years now. So I’ve seen a lot in those years.

I graduated into a time where I think I signed up for Facebook my last week of school. YouTube was just exploding. So I’ve been part of this generation that’s been in that transition between traditional to digital media. And digital media, of course, is exploding.

But recently, it’s really all about choice. There’s just so many more options for everybody in the media space. If you just take a tactic like video, what used to be a nice and simple TV campaign now needs to consider all of these different types of tactics. And we know that people are spreading their time out. And it’s much more fragmented. They might still have a cable subscription. They’re maybe watching live sports on regular network affiliates. But they also subscribe to four to six different streaming services that they’re dividing their time on, depending on what programs on there, what shows are new.

So it makes it much more difficult.

There’s not an either or scenario in anything. It’s and. You want to reach them in video. You need to be here and here and here and here.

And there’s overlap in some of those things. But it’s made a lot more challenging because from a cost standpoint, even with things migrating from traditional TV, they’re not charging necessarily less for those spot rates. So it still requires that same level of budget in TV. Well, then adding another complementary budget in a tactic like CTV and social is similar.

Data is still kind of dominant from an ad standpoint. People are on Facebook, on Instagram, but you’ve got TikTok. You’ve got X. You’ve got LinkedIn. You’ve got Snapchat and Reddit and all of these different platforms that people are using for different use cases. Some are more about connecting with people. Some are more entertainment platforms. TikTok is really more about entertainment than anything else. Right.

There’s just a lot to consider.

It requires a lot of research into the audience to understand where they’re spending their time on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah, and I was going to follow up on that actually. We often, when we’re meeting with clients or prospects, talk about the fact that we are an audience-first shop. We use the insights around our audience to determine where we’re going to put whatever it is that we’re creating. You want to talk just a little bit about that process?

Yeah.

We mostly use a tool called GWI. It’s a survey-based tool. It’s refreshed on a quarterly basis. You can find a lot of different demographics and behavioral characteristics, shopping behavior, things like that. With just about any, particularly, consumer audiences, you can dig into who they are, what makes them tick, but we can also go really deep on their media consumption.

Within the social space, how much time are they spending on a day-to-day basis? Which platforms are they on?

Where do they like to receive marketing messages?

For example, if you think about more of a younger audience, you have platforms like Snapchat that are really highly used, but may not be the best place for us to advertise. Same thing with TikTok. TikTok is a very, very different strategy from a creative side.

Just because somebody is spending their time there, will your ad resonate there? It may. It may not. Sometimes it needs to be its own standalone practice.

We really spend a lot of time digging into those details. When we’re talking through a plan with any of our clients, that’s where we start. Here’s what we’ve learned about where the consumption has maybe evolved over the last year or where it’s changing, where we can best engage those audiences. Then we start talking about specific tactics within them and why they make sense.

That makes complete sense. I know we joke sometimes. I’m a big TikTok user. I wish I weren’t because I get sucked in for hours and hours at a time. You’ve always been a big Twitter now, ex-user.

We’re both millennials, but just in slightly different sections.

I’m an elder millennial.

Yes. I’m a very young millennial. Therefore, TikTok is my jam. I think it’s funny because you used to be able to create one asset and just share it across everything. We would say that too. Create once, use many. We still use that principle for certain things. Now you have to be really intentional with the type of content you’re putting in each of these places. I’m curious. Obviously, from a social perspective, you want that more bespoke type stuff that’s going in each channel.

Going back to TV for a second, when we’re talking traditional TV or streaming or CTV,

are there differences that you see there in the types of assets that you would be creating and the messaging that you would be using? Is that more just a difference in how it’s purchased?

I think a little of both. Starting with, I think, how you purchase it,

there is more and more data available for us to actually target.

There’s a few approaches that we can take. If we’re thinking about video and thinking about TV, we might start from a platform standpoint if we know that the audience is on the platform. We might go and handpick and really curate that list of platforms that we want to be running on. Then in other cases, we might go more very audience targeted.

It really depends on the audience. It really depends on the objectives of the campaign.

One of the things you see on the CTV side, there are different types of ad units that you can play into. Amazon has really been pushing those shoppable ad units if you’re watching anything on Prime Video.

You see some that are, a lot of times they call it the L-bar, where you have the video is taking up about two-thirds of the screen and then you’ve got a little bit of response type things. Sometimes there’s carousels you can rotate through products.

What we used to call the lower third in direct marketing.

There are different ad formats that you can run there

can make it sometimes a little bit easier for the person to respond in real time.

I’m on the fence of whether or not paying the premium is worth it for some of those cases because sometimes you’re asking for them to respond and they’re just at a point where they’re not ready to respond.

I think it’s asking a little …

You can get chips on the couch.

Right. I think you’re asking more out of the video tactic than what it is designed to do. It is great at mass reach and it’s great as building awareness and really communicating the benefits to your product, but not everybody’s going to stop what they’re doing and go buy it. Yeah.

Don’t expect them to do this. You can have those types of response mechanisms, but we see much better results from video type efforts if we’re looking at things like correlation to site traffic and correlation to more back end business data. You want to see incremental growth in sales or revenue or leads or something like that versus something that is directly attributable because somebody clicked on a QR code or went to a vanity URL. That’s going to be a really low percentage.

That makes sense. It also makes me think about attribution, which I think is something we’ve been talking about a lot in these last few years. Cookies have been going away now for what feels like an eternity.

What do you think is on the horizon there in terms of attribution? There was a period of time where it was all performance. We want to know exactly how everything’s doing and we’re going to make decisions based on that. It seems like maybe the pendulum is swinging back a little bit.

Absolutely.

I think we’re seeing it more and more where

were very much in this performance marketing, ROAS driven environment. Part of it was there was a lot of ways that we could easily track those things.

With privacy laws changing, with cookies going away, those got less and less reliable.

But it also, I think, what people started to learn is it’s almost like a drug. It gives you that quick hit and those quick short term results, but it doesn’t grow you long term. Sure.

It’s a long term. What you worry about in those scenarios is, “If I turn it off, will all these sales go away?”

There are better tactics where you could run it for a period of time and if you turn it off there will be a lasting impact.

Right, a tail.

The long tail, the halo effect that comes with that. You’re seeing more brands who are starting to recognize that and you’re seeing the pendulum swing back towards brand building. Maybe not to fully swing that way because we’ve done that. I think people are starting to recognize that more full funnel type campaigns, we need to still be out there capturing demand, but also are there ways that we can be creating demand and building awareness for the product in that piece too.

Right, totally. I know that’s something we talk about that is a focus for us here is short term wins, but long term sustainable growth. We’ll have people, prospects come to us that are like, “All right, well where do we start? We have limited budget.” I think oftentimes paid search will be a part of that mix, right? Let’s look in market for the people who are already searching for whatever service or product that you provide, but the problem with that is there’s a ceiling usually. You have to make that part of a mix that is going to help build up the demand as well.

Exactly. It’s still important to find that ceiling.

Let’s capture the existing demand that’s out there.

Let’s go out and reach those people first and make sure we are succeeding in those channels. Usually when we get involved, there are a lot of things that we can do. There’s a lot of levers we can pull in the search channel.

There are ways that we can find. Oftentimes we also see brands where maybe they feel like they’ve hit a ceiling in paid search, but sometimes you just have to keep pushing and you can break through and get to another level. Eventually, you’re just going to run out of opportunity there.

Then we get the question, “All right, how do we diversify? How do we start thinking about some other tactics?”

Some things like video can have higher cost of entries, both from a creative development standpoint, but also just from a media standpoint. A lot of that just depends on the size of the audience. If you’re just targeting a 35-plus audience, that’s massive.

To do something on a national scale requires a massive budget.

We get around that by either we find ways to shrink the audience. How do we narrow it further? You can do that through targeting. You can do that through geography. Sometimes we might say, “Let’s pick some key markets that we know have good growth potential. Let’s start testing a more full funnel mix in there, measure the incrementality that’s coming from that, and then look to scale and grow from there.”

Taking a little bit of a kind of going back a tiny bit. If you’re having an optimal media mix, you’re doing a little bit of search, social is usually a nice way to do that. We’ve been having conversations with clients about user-generated content. It’s been coming up a lot more. I had Heather on a few weeks ago to talk about that.

What’s your take on that? I know often you’re like, “Let’s do some low-entry user-generated stuff so that we can put paid behind it.” Are you finding that that’s successful for our clients?

Yeah, a lot of it is really, we need a lot of different assets to run in social. We need video, we need static images, we need copy associated with that. There’s carousel options.

There’s so much that you need to rotate in that just bringing in a different voice to tell your story can often be really, really beneficial. They don’t have to be big massive celebrities all the time. I think where we’ve seen a lot of things change is finding really solid creators that for a few thousand dollars can make a really good piece of content. They may not have the organic reach where you’re going to see a big boost in results from them posting alone, but taking that and now putting some money behind it and paid can be really helpful. Again, just gives a different person talking about it than more of our standard ads or some of the videos that we’re creating there.

It’s really cost-effective too. It can take a lot to produce a video and cast somebody and do things like that. There’s a place for that, but sometimes we also just need things quick turn.

You’re seeing a lot more platform start to get stood up. We’re allowing brands to more easily connect with UGC creators and talking to them about are they just building it specifically to post to their own organic channels or are they just building content to send to you that you can then use in an ad campaign. There’s lots of different approaches that we can use there. We’ve started to do that more with our clients just to make sure that we have a lot of different messages out there.

Right. The diversity of content piece is so nice. I think there’s some credibility to that too. Especially Gen Z, I would say the younger millennials are sometimes questioning messages that come from brand. They just want to hear it from somebody else. It makes complete sense. Speaking of which, you just mentioned organic reach.

I think in the last two years we’ve had a lot of conversations with clients and partners about this.

You can correct me if I misquote this, but I think for meta, organic reach is somewhere around 5% right now.

It’s pretty low.

You almost have to put some sort of spend behind it. I think Facebook particularly is harder. I think people are getting smarter with things like TikTok and Instagram Reels where they start to understand the algorithm a little bit better and maybe can find ways to get content out there. But you have to be really quick in that space. I think a lot of brands struggle with the speed of which they need to move to be successful in organic. It’s not that you can’t get a lot of eyeballs on content. It’s that you really have to dedicate resources to. You have to have a really strong–and I think a lot of times it’s better to have an in-house team that can move very quickly, that’s empowered to post things without four or five layers of approvals. When we create things, we work a lot in the healthcare space. That’s much harder to do. Everything has to go through layers of approval, not only with our client teams, but with compliance and legal type of restrictions.

That makes it much harder to move at the speed you need to be successful in organic. Paid allows us to move at our own pace and control things a little bit better.

To your point, we do often talk with clients about that. Have a person in-house. If you want to have really engaging comments on your social, one of my favorite things on TikTok is that brands get in on the fun from a commenting perspective. That’s not even them creating content.

When I scroll through the comments, which is half the fun of TikTok, to be honest, because people are so creative, it’s wild.

Seeing what the brands say is always the best. Sometimes that’s five words. It probably took somebody less than five minutes to come up with, but then they’re getting a ton of impressions or something else that is going viral. That’s another small way to get in on the fun, if you will.

There’s been a lot of that on Twitter, too. Brands getting involved there. Wendy’s is one that always is finding ways to insert themselves into the conversation.

It’s fun seeing those types of engagement people bringing more personality to it. That’s where in-house teams for the type of thing can be effective, because they do have the power to maybe push things a little bit more. We can help push them towards that direction, but eliminating those approvals is going to be more successful.

Thank you so much, Bob. I really appreciate talking about what we think maybe is going to be happening this year.

Next week, when we talk