Jack Myers Report to the Industry Identifies Keys to Growth Ahead

His inspiring central themes:

• The times call for each of us to step up, lead, and show what we can do, as individuals and as teams.
• High performing teams integrate capabilities by breaking down the isolation of silos.
• We have been playing a "share of market" game, seeking to take from each other, but we would be wiser now to recognize we are all one community standing together to grow the pie for advertising as a whole. The rising tide will lift all ships. There are still hundreds of billions being spent on below the line promotion that will generate more growth once shifted to advertising.
• We have been undervaluing our programming inventory by understating its importance to advertising effectiveness, causing its perceptual weight in Myers annual industry surveys to slide from 70% to 30% in the last ten years. This must be reversed by objective factual research and educational marketing.
• Performance marketing is making room for Purposeful marketing and we all will empirically determine the right balance.

Jack pointed out that our fundamental business models are in most cases a hundred years old and are overdue for new thinking. The kneejerk setting of targets which vastly understate the importance of 55+ must be acknowledged to be bias and therefore keelhauled.

The relationship between advertisers and agencies is being reinvented. Jack invited the audience to attend a series of upcoming Leadership Conversations for Renewal and Growth in which top advertiser, agency and media executives will share their views on the reconstruction, and to raise their virtual hands to input their own ideas.

Brand managers spend 2% of their time on media. At the same time, educational content marketing that could make brand managers more sophisticated about media and advertising is being dramatically underused, with trade communication down -60% in the last ten years. While urging a great increase in all forms of educational marketing, Jack announced one new MediaVillage service MeetingPrep.com which brand managers could use for 15 minutes in preparing for media meetings.

In forecasting the changes in media to come, Jack cited the three-wave Spanish Flu epidemic (the second wave being the worst) and applied it to the probable upticks in COVID-19 still to come as the world flows more fully back to work, suggesting a possible second wave in September-October 2020. Overlaying the Spanish Flu model, he estimated probable economic comeback restarting the next gradual boom in 2022-2023.

Although the industry will be hard hit this year with total marketing down -21.8%, and down -4.7% in 2021, he expects digital will grow +3.1% in 2021, and even in 2020 some media will see growth, specifically search +2%, digital video +11.4%, videogame advertising +2%, and interactive TV/VOD/addressable TV the big winner at +12% in 2020.

Jack then gave out the annual awards to the media sales organizations given highest ratings by the 700 agency/advertiser executives surveyed. Hulu and Pandora won the most awards, but over 40 media companies big and small, new, and old won awards. By the categories in which awards were given out, Jack not only encouraged people for their good work but also called attention to the virtues most important to agencies and advertisers, including trust, confidence in results, innovation, data, and measurement.

I'm looking forward to having a stimulating and useful Zoom conversation on June 9th with Jack, Comcast's Marcien Jenckes, Dish's Kevin Arrix, and Cadent's Jamie Power, on the Leadership Conversation Will COVID-19 Move Advanced & Addressable TV Forward or Backward: Leaders' Perspective. Hope you all can attend. Click the link to register.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.