Media Insights Q&A with Michael McGuirre and Eric Bartko - Charlene Weisler

Mike McGuirre, VP MSA Media, and Eric Bartko, Senior Marketing Research Manager Business Analysis MSA Media work in a unique and pivotal part of the media contract fulfillment industry. Mike is a 20 year veteran of MSA with expertise in the post buy auditing area. Recently his work has taken him into data analysis and analytics to help better inform clients. Eric's expertise started with CPG clients examining media mix modeling and has extended into STB and C3 analytics with network clients. In this interview, Mike and Eric talk about MSA and work in commercial analytics, addressable advertising and some upcoming industry trends.

There are three videos that cover the following topics:

Subject Length (in minutes)
Background (5:01)
Addressable Advertising (6:41)
Commercial Pods (7:03)
Predictions (6:31)

Below is a short excerpt of some of the video interview. Direct links to the full interview videos can be found at WeislerMedia.blogspot.com

CW: Mike, addressable advertising appears to be coming into its own. From your perspective and from your part of the business at MSA, what do you see addressable advertising going?

MMc: I would say that it will take a little while before it becomes widespread. It will grow continuously over the next several years. But I think that while it is great to talk about segmenting your target and targeting your ads specifically to those groups, you still need to have some broad based messaging to keep your brand name out there. What is the right balance between a very heavily targeted message among high loyals or light switchers versus a more broad based campaign to try and get someone to buy or even consider your product who are not currently aware of it or who may, as their life evolves, might consider purchasing your product. So I think there is still a lot to learn about the balance of addressability and traditional broad based advertising.

In the way advertising is bought and sold today on a national media basis, you buy a spot and it runs to all potential viewers of that network. When you think of carving up your inventory, the more the way the internet is bought and sold today, how you price that becomes an interesting question. If the spots are still going to be sold the way they are today as opposed to a more auction driven model like the internet spots are bought and sold, I would think that networks and agencies would need some relatively powerful tools to find out what increase over the average cpm should they be paying when they are targeting a segment of the population. On the network side – what premium or discount should we charge versus what is going to be left for me to sell. I think that is one of the reasons why it's going to take a little while to adopt addressable advertising on a mass basis. Those business models that are driving $70 billion in TV sales are sometimes slow to change or evolve and addressable is a relatively drastic change. I am curious as to how early adopters such as Invidi and other companies that are starting to segment their populations based on advertising requests are going to figure out how much to charge for all the segmented parts and any remnant inventory.

CW: Eric, can you talk about what MSA does in the area of measuring commercial pods?

EB: We work primarily with the Nielsen data for networks doing copy impact analysis which is measuring the impact that certain copy has on audience delivery and flow. If delivery levels during a commercial pod have a bowl shape – the highest deliveries are in the beginning and at the end – our analysis can help improve the delivery in the middle of the pod. There may be particular ad copy that performs well no matter where it is in the commercial pod. What impact does this particular brand, copy, ad etc bring to the entire pod?

CW: So you are saying that some brands have a halo effect on the commercial pod or is it driven by a particular creative for the spot?

EB: It is a combination of both. In our results, we found particular brands having good and bad copy. Some of it is obviously driven by wear-out, airing a particular copy too much. That can impact a brand. But there are specific brands that seem that no matter what the copy or creative it is, always does well.

Interview conducted by Charlene Weisler or Weisler Media LLC. Weisler is a media research veteran and can be reached through her blogwww.WeislerMedia.blogspot.comor atWeislerMedia@yahoo.com.

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