The past few weeks have seen a predictable turnaround in the press perception of the future of television. TiVo Research has been reporting that TV outsells and lifts ratings more than digital for years, as has Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia. It was only a matter of time before the press and Wall Street would catch up with these facts. And in the past few weeks, Symphony Advanced Media has begun publishing its VideoPulse service, counting the many viewers missed by Nielsen and agreeing pretty well on the ones both companies measure. This has proven the widely suspected fact that despite the apparent collapse of TV audience in Nielsen data, nothing could be farther from the truth. SMI CCO James Fennessy’s recent blog showed that TV ad sales could not be healthier in their present strong rebound, built upon the factual ability of TV advertising to cause sales beyond any other paid media advertising force on Earth. And the true leaders like Dave Poltrack at CBS and Howard Shimmel at Turner continue to bang away at proving TV ROI.
The return to sanity as regards TV skies falling does not mean that the future for TV is going to be as lush as in the past. There is a horde of competition coming from everywhere, including people in technology companies rolling in dough. Money is a valuable thing to have when one is trying to lure the relatively few proven still-hot talents in the creative community of the world. There is going to be a move to become more of a content creator than a distributor, as the price war among distributors continues mercilessly.
TV will get a boost when it fully monetizes addressable commercials, which will have the effect of more than a 30% increase in the total amount of the top line heading into television. This is both because they will attract small business as well as big, and because the math works that way. The table below shows that the seller more than doubled his money from the sale of one spot using optimized addressable commercials, despite lowering the CPM against the true target audience to all of the advertisers. (I am happy to take anyone through the table by phone.) These independent articles also agree with the idea of a significantly increased pie as a result of addressables: Scientific Atlanta and Sanford Bernstein. The Scientific Atlanta forecast is $15B per year incremental to MVPDs. Next Century Media’s forecast was $22B.
What has held addressables back since they were first introduced by