What’s The CPM On Your Culture?
Today’s AdAge proffers an article and video bizarrely entitled NBC’s New Upfront Format Puzzles Media Buyers. Apparently, NBC’s presentation didn’t include any calls to action or direct sales pitches, and all those dewey-eyed media buyers were confused! (Note to AdAge: The people who get confused when a call to action isn’t present are called account executives.)
If you haven’t had enough surrealism yet today, skip ahead to about 1:53 in the video, where Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, attempts to explain the conundrum without actually saying anything. The key excerpt:
In the coming years, what it’s going to be best served to do is going to be to actually cater to media buyers that are more interested in buying culture and cultural relevance, and buying affiliations with the media company’s content, than the targeting and the addressability aspects of it.
This is hugely enlightening. So many times, publishers came to present to me, and then went on and on about their site without touching on the location of the ads and being as vague as possible about their targeting methodologies. And I would think, who have these people been talking to, that they think this is the kind of stuff anyone at an agency wants to hear? But now I know…they’ve been talking to this fucking guy. Thanks, Ian!
Ian Schafer wrote:
I appreciate the commentary. The context of the question was missing, though…
The question was, ‘what is the future of the upfront?’
And to paraphrase, what I said was that the upfronts will, in the future, cater more to advertisers looking to buy against content and culture — not audience. Buying against specific audiences will instead be done via addressability and other forms of technological targeting that will be rolled out over the next few years. But those budgets will need to be flexible and nimble, and therefore will likely not be part of an upfront ‘upfront’ commitment.
Hope that makes sense now.
Cheers!
Posted on 14-May-08 at 5:39 pm | Permalink
miconian wrote:
I did interpret your sound byte as a response to the first half of the AdAge video (and in my defense, I think the video is edited to support that idea). But having watched it again, I see that you were actually speaking in response to the upfront question.
Posted on 14-May-08 at 6:30 pm | Permalink
Contextual Targeting When The Context Is Other Ads at Media Mandible wrote:
[...] Schafer (whose commentary I unfairly bashed in a recent post), comments on YouTube’s new efforts to sell ads that will appear next to [...]
Posted on 15-May-08 at 3:20 pm | Permalink