Hot Takes: Linear TV Steals Back The Spotlight

This past week, the industry stood up and took notice of the massive numbers put up by Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone” which is now up to 12.7 million LIve+3 viewers for its season premier and Adele’s “One Night Only” special on CBS which drew almost 10 million viewers.

It was a further sign that brands and programmers are going to have to contend with viewing patterns that shift between streaming and linear and will need to seek out ways to reach viewers on both platforms for the foreseeable future.

We asked our Thought Leaders Circle members for input on this, what issues it brought up and what some best practices might be for this bifurcated future.

Field Garthwaite, CEO & Co-Founder at IRIS.TV spoke to the need for a uniform content identifier that would allow TV and CTV to be bought in a more consistent manner.

We should have an industry-wide initiative focused on content transparency, just like the initiatives around identity, so TV and Connected TV can be bought in a consistent manner. To do so means that major agencies must be able to access content data signals for CTV the same way they do for TV. This requires a uniform content identifier that works for buyers across supply sources while also protecting value for content owners.

Allen Bush, Chief Marketing Officer at LG Ads focused on how LG’s deterministic data can help brands balance reach and frequency across heavy and light linear viewers.

For most brands with a mass audience, video advertising still all starts with linear TV when carving up the video budget. Linear remains the king of reach. Our work with brands hinges on helping them build on what they are doing with linear; too many pundits are ringing the death knell for linear TV and that's just not reality. The majority of Americans watch both linear and OTT on their televisions and this will remain the case for the next several years. What deterministic data from LG Ads helps our partners understand is how linear TV buys, even when indexed to an audience, deliver out-of-whack reach and frequency across the linear TV audience. So, in addition to being able to pinpoint, precisely, the viewers that are incremental to any linear campaign, we can help manage TV budgets to balance reach and frequency across heavy and light linear viewers.

Finally, Michael Tuminello, Vice President of Strategy at Mediaocean spoke about how using AI and automation lets brands create more efficient unified buys in an inefficient and fragmented market.

While the market has been understandably excited about the emergence and growth of a new full-screen advertising channel (CTV), if you look at the numbers the less-often-told story is that the decline of linear is predicted to be gradual and both linear and non-CTV digital video are forecast to be much larger than CTV for the length of most forecasts – 3+ years. So it’s extremely important for brand and agencies (and publishers and platforms) to be as effective as possible in TV+video advertising across many devices and platforms.  

Another relevant trend is the rise of AI and automation. The expectation is not only that you will need to make it efficient to create, deliver, and measure video advertising that runs across all channels, but ultimately that you will need to take the output (metrics) and feed them back into the input of the cycle (planning), so the process and the results can improve. That vision of efficient unified TV+video advertising – despite a inefficient fragmented marketplace – is what we are focused on delivering for the industry.

Our TVREV take is that the current market is indeed fragmented and inefficient with limited content transparency and that makes it difficult for brands to feel confident about their TV buys. By introducing a universal content identifier that works across linear and CTV, focusing on how to balance reach and frequency between light and heavy linear viewers and introducing AI and automation to the buying cycle in order to increase cross-platform efficiency, the industry can make strides to change that and to increase buyer confidence.

While linear viewership is indeed shrinking, it is shrinking slowly and we believe there is a floor at which cord cutting will flatten out leaving around 30% to 40% of the audience still on linear.

The thing is it will take many years—quite likely the rest of the decade—to reach that floor, and as such the industry need to be prepared to help advertisers plan and buy in an imperfect environment. That in turn calls for greater cooperation and the introduction of universally agreed upon standards, both of which are more easily said than done.