Every upfront season the television industry sets out to do battle with what they perceive to be the enemy—other TV industry players, CTV players in particular. 

Only that’s not the enemy they should be focusing on. Digital players like Alphabet and Meta is the real enemy.

Why Marketers Love Digital

For years the advertising industry hid behind the apocryphal John Wanamaker quote, “I know that half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Television was king, especially for big brands. It offered massive reach, ample frequency and the ability to tell a brand’s story in sight, sound and motion, offering an emotional connection with the viewer.

The problem, of course, was that there was no way to quantify the impact TV had on sales. Nielsen provided ratings based on its panels, but those ratings didn’t tell you what individual viewers did after they saw the ad. Advertising was sold by daypart, so if you were selling a shampoo aimed at women during prime time, you were still hitting millions of men, few of whom had any input into that particular purchase decision. 

Similarly, if you were selling a car, most of the people seeing your ad were not currently in the market for a new car—your goal was to create a positive image for the brand so that when they did go to buy a new car, they would place your brand in their initial consideration set.

The assumption was that television worked because the majority of Americans were watching the same shows at the same time, and thus a well done TV ad campaign would become ubiquitous, so much a part of the culture that ads were regularly parodied on shows like Saturday Night Live. And in that unquantifiable ubiquity was the power to influence sales.

Then along came digital and digital display advertising.

While no one was under any illusion that banner ads packed the same creative or emotional punch as a TV commercial, they had something TV commercials did not: they were trackable.

This means the advertiser knows exactly who saw each and every ad they ran and exactly what that person did after seeing the ad, such as visit the website or make a purchase. 

Compare that to television, where the networks could estimate that a certain percentage of a target audience had seen the ad based on Nielsen’s notoriously imprecise ratings. Or an ad agency could collect stats showing that sales went up 10% during the six weeks the campaign was on the air. Or that a brand lift study showed that 20% of people likely to buy a car within the next three years viewed one brand more favorably after seeing an ad campaign, and 70% of them claimed they would consider visiting a dealership when the time came to buy a new car. 

While this may sound like we are comparing apples and oranges, imagine that you are a brand manager at a large auto manufacturer with a $200 million ad budget, a budget you need to defend to the C-suite on a regular basis.

Meta and Alphabet provide you with lovely four-color charts showing exactly who clicked on your banner ads, which banner ads each person clicked on, broken down by location and demographic, how many of those clicks resulted in visits to your website, to your local dealerships’ websites, to the page where potential buyers can book visits to local dealerships, to actually leasing or buying one of your cars.

Now chances are you are savvy enough to know that no one actually buys a car after seeing a banner ad, but the charts and the data seem to offer proof that this is exactly what happens and they help you to justify your budget: we spend X dollars and sold Y cars after getting Z clicks from our ads. 

Meanwhile, your defense of your TV budget is couched in vague generalities: people thought our ads were funny, they said they liked our cars better after seeing our new ads and thought that in a few years they might buy one…if Consumer Reports still gives us a high rating. It’s all based on self-reported survey stats and numerical projections.

Even your direct response TV stats seem fuzzy, as you can’t provide a direct correlation between a specific household seeing your President’s Day Sale ad and a car being driven off the lot. 

Not the way Alphabet and Meta can.

So it’s no wonder brand managers want to shift money away from TV and over to digital. They may know that TV ads are more effective in the long run. But they also know it’s a lot easier to justify their ad budgets and ultimately their jobs with those shiny four-color digital charts.

TV Needs To Tear Down Its Walled Gardens And Join Forces

Right now, the television industry finally has access to the sort of granular data that will allow them to fight back against all those four-color charts.

Digital has historically transacted on a 1:1 impression basis, while linear TV has historically transacted on the household level (1:many) basis. One of the biggest opportunities for digital TV buyers will be to bridge the gap between household-level traditional TV buying and individual-level digital buying.

And now, thanks to ACR data, TV providers now know who actually saw which ad, what they did after they saw that ad, right down to the ultimate purchase decision. They can even measure the effects of image ads versus product ads versus direct response ads. And they can do that on a national or a local basis.

But rather than joining forces and making it easier for brands to get access to this sort of data, television providers, both linear and streaming, are mostly concerned with building walled gardens and using the data they collect for their own purposes.

This does not help our hypothetical brand manager who now has to manage multiple results from multiple providers, few of which provide any sort of easy apples-to-apples comparison that would make it easy to determine the ultimate value of the brand’s massive TV spend.

Imagine though, if they did share that data, how much easier it would be for our brand manager to defend their TV budget and to increase that budget, given that television advertising is far more effective than display advertising and able to do more than just drive direct response sales.

That’s why the television industry needs to recognize who its enemy is and tear down its walled gardens so they can all band together to fight off Alphabet and Meta.

In the words of Simon Sinek, "There's no such thing as winning or losing in the infinite game, there's only ahead and behind."

It’s time TV starts to move ahead.