Preparing for the Pivotal Upfront

Statacy

Austria and France have started a ripple effect illegalizing Google Analytics, expected to ripple out across the EU. This is based on the EU Data Protection Act which classifies what Google is doing as illegally transferring data from a sovereign nation to another nation.

This is a variation on privacy and relates more to state concerns rather than private concerns. Perhaps it might be called "statacy."

What is being illegalized is core to what the two dominant global Internet companies do. That's not at all illogical, given the importance of information. Why would a country want foreign parties to have access to the records of most or all its citizens? And a direct route into their minds?

This is one step in the direction of making ID Graphs illegal (except for governments).

The EU had better be careful to not impair audience and business outcomes measurement in its efforts to protect privacy and statacy.

The Great Equalizer

The U.S. emerged from WWII as the savior of world freedom. And as half of the economic wealth of the world, not to mention the only one with atomic weapons.

Today the pendulum has swung 180 degrees and the U.S. is divided against itself and perceived therefore as unable to stand. Every other nation, friendlier or more foe-like, is taking advantage of the situation to level the playing field.

Some of the credit for that division goes to the runaway train wreck aspect of the Internet -- especially as played by foreign geniuses with our welfare most conspicuously not taken into account.

Advertisers are more and more looking at a global market. Although the U.S. might not pass statacy laws nor even privacy laws, what happens in the EU will have a strong influence on what advertisers do here. There is a belief in global consistency in the minds of the largest advertisers, and a realistic aversion to giving the newly volatile and vociferous public a reason to point fingers of blame at a brand.

Digital Transmission Is Taking Over

About 70% of Americans under 50 prefer streaming to broadcast, cable or satellite. Between streaming and ATSC 3.0, the new video distribution paradigm is rapidly taking over. Part of the reason is Video On Demand (VOD) – being able to watch what you want when you want, without any bother. It has also been introduced with a smaller commercial load, or if you like, without any commercials, at a premium. This is making TV stronger, but the period of change opens the door to new players.

This Upfront will lock in the scarce TV inventory for the major advertisers through September 2023. By then the preference of 80% of under-50 Americans and 60% of over-50 Americans may be for streaming/ATSC 3.0.

This Upfront is where the curves change direction at historic scale.

Consumers Have Had It with Annoying Advertising

Over 200 million people worldwide have digital ad blockers. These are mostly younger people, many of them gamers.

Advertising needs to become a more enjoyable experience. Inspiring, entertaining and informative brand content has shown one way to do this, and it is still being under-used in television.

My original idea about addressable TV commercials was to make them more relevant to the viewer. Instead, the naïve mis-use of addressability in digital has caused academics to rename addressable advertising "surveillance advertising."

Dilution Has Superseded Recency as the Dominant Media Theory

Advertisers and their research suppliers have brought the light of truth to the party, and today few would question the importance of linear TV as the foundation of a strong advertising campaign. But from 1980 until 2010 the advertisers and agencies responded to the toughening of the game with a dilution strategy: use the best TV at the launch, gradually replace broadcast with cable, prime with other dayparts, but maintain your reach and frequency against a giant sex/age group which you vaguely associate with your best prospects (despite vast waste and the boomerang effect in excess frequency).

Thus, it was easy to continue the dilution thinking of 2010 to now, shifting TV bucks to digital -- always starting with quality but then soon transitioning to shorter spots and lower CPM media.

Dilution theory is bankrupt. It was never the right answer because it focused on cutting costs, not on creativity. Dilution was not a strategy to make advertising more effective, but to simply maintain GRP levels.

The New Context Strategy

It has just in time been discovered that placing ads in contexts where the moods and emotions, tones and themes and centrally the unspoken motivations suffusing the contextual content align with those permeating the ad, increases the quality of the viewer experience, the brand equity and sales lift of the ad.

The company carrying out this science, RMT, of which I'm chairman, calls it "Exalting the Creative," meaning giving the creative the best chance to do its work by placing it in resonant, ad-amplifying contexts for that particular ad. And for addressable media, locating the people who are most motivated by the motivations subconsciously or consciously communicated by that particular ad.

After all, the creative carries 65% of the sales and branding effect of the impression, so why not use media that exalt the specific creative?

This is the Upfront at which a significant number of leading minds in the industry will stock up on environments conducive to the creative they are planning. It will still be a minority, but it will be a triple-digit percent increase over the prior Upfront. They will be focused on the quality of the impression the brand creative and the viewer are making together within the viewer's Deep Self.

Unfortunately, the majority of those who extol context-based buying this year will only be using it to skew the impressions toward almost-meaningless sex/age groups. This superficial view of ad targeting and of human individuality gets the poor results that it deserves.

Only through the quality of the joint media-creative experience can advertisers maintain the affordability of brand growth and long-term bonding with loyal customers. Dilution is the road to implosion. Many will stay on that road too long.

Those who move in this Upfront will secure their legacy for decades to come. In this sensitive moment in time characterized by rejectionism, brands that persist in the old games are lambs to the slaughter.

Some are calling this approach "privacy first" because using contexts is a proven alternative to addressability/"surveillance."

Contexts are future proof. I prefer to think of it as human beings first. Advertisers with a respect for human beings communicate authentically and get their messages across powerfully.

Run-of-the-mill practitioners follow the herd and imitate the ads they have liked in the past, ads which have a certain appealing style, or did, the first time the style was used. Award-winning copywriter Nick Pisacane coined the phrase "the mask of the advertiser" to denote the bulk of ads in which the innate humanity of the communicator is in hiding behind the cliché tropes of which the ad is composed.

People started to hide behind masks long before Covid, so why shouldn't advertisers? Because taking off the layer of falsity and imitation is what really breaks through in communication.

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