New York -- With the majority of marketers wanting to target
their advertisers in an age of increasing viewer fragmentation, panelists at
B&C/Multichannel News' Advanced Advertising event here Wednesday afternoon
addressed the question of "Mass vs. Individual – Which Really Sells Better?"
"Mass advertising is never going to go away," said Michael
Bologna, director of emerging communications for GroupM during the panel moderated by B&C Business Editor Jon Lafayette. "You're never going to
see 100 percent of national TV advertising going to a targeted audience."
Looking at waste is a good starting point in leveraging
addressability, Bologna said, keeping in mind that one advertiser's waste – like
viewers outside the preferred 18-49 demo – could be another advertiser's
target. But though the industry has been slow to take advantage of
hyper-targeting – highlighted by Canoe shuttering its interactive TV adbusiness last week
– Bologna says there is blame to go around.
"We all need to commit to this, but it doesn't come without a
cost," he said. "We're just as much to blame for the slow adoption as the
operators and programmers."
Andrew Capone, senior VP of marketing & business development
at NCC argued that adoption depends on a rational marketplace for addressable
ads, like there is for traditional TV advertising at the upfronts.
"If the advanced advertising platform is to evolve, there
have to be generally accepted sales principles. It has to be a rational place to
do business, instead of a lurching test scenario that we've been operating in
for quite some time," he said.
More than reach, branded content environments are key
according to Greg D'Alba, president, CNN news networks and Turner digital ad
sales and marketing, who said that a consumer is more likely to buy content in
an environment in which it is shared.
"The notion of shared content within a community has never
been more valuable," he said. "If we push our content out to consumers the way they
want it, that's a value proposition that has to be defined by different
currency," than traditional CPMs that measure reach.
Weighing in on Canoe, Joe Noonan, COO of Viamedia said he
was disappointed to the advanced ads business close, expressing concern that
technology companies will begin to bypass cable operators and go directly to
the consumer, as they have started to do through apps like Shazam for TV.
"What we can be focused on as an industry more than anything
else is to consider the customer and what's important to them," he said. "We
have to solve some problems with customers in mind rather than engineers in
mind."
Bologna had less love lost for Canoe, saying, "National
advertisers are disappointed, but at the end of the day we have to move on,"
pointing out as Noonan did that the same applications can be used on tablets
and smartphones.
But as Rich Forester, VP, new business development national
advertising sales at DirecTV, noted, without cooperation among operators like
that attempted by Canoe, national campaigns miss that scale of reach – and it's
a hurdle that's not easy to get over.
"What we're really talking about is trying to make money in
the mass market one person at a time," he said. "I think each provider has to
get together with their own staffs to solve that problem."
