Week In Review: Cannes and the Upfronts/Newfronts, Net Neutrality Lives (For Now.)
- Cannes and the Upfronts/Newfronts
With the space of six weeks, the television and advertising industries will go from the NewFronts and Upfronts to the Cannes Advertising festival, probably the three most important events of the year.What’s particularly striking this year is that they feel like they’re happening in parallel universes.In NewFront/Upfront World, TV is still king and if there was one message we got from all the events, it was that the type of engaging storytelling found on television is still the gold standard and that the impressive metrics that digital properties have been showing around video really aren’t all that—put the same metrics against the World Series and you’ll have twice as many views as there are people on the planet.And yet just a few weeks later, along a narrow stretch of beach in the south of France, at a festival designed to celebrate the increasingly irrelevant “creative” end of advertising, ad agencies and brands will be marveling at the latest and greatest ad products put out by the increasingly relevant social networks, Snapchat and Facebook in particular.Snapchat will be showing off it’s aggressively expanded ad platform, with creative partners and media partners galore, all creating video ads for the platform in the hopes of luring advertisers looking to reach elusive Gen Z consumers. (We’d like to give a quick plug here to our friends at Delmondo who can help you figure out anything and everything Snapchat related.)Facebook will also be active too, talking up their new online creative hub that (allegedly) uncomplicates the ad creation process along with improvements to Messenger and a new plan to use GPS to track whether consumers actually act on retail ads by going to visit the store. Why It MattersMedia and advertising are heading down two different tracks and those tracks are going to intersect at some point. When and how and why are anyone’s guess, though that won’t stop us from speculating. Both have strengths and weaknesses and it’s unlikely that one will overtake the other—they’ll both have to get along and everyone will have to learn to play nice with both of them. Kumbayah. What You Need To Do About ItUnderstand that there will not be any winner or losers, just compromises and negotiations and play your cards accordingly. The Television Industrial Complex is not going away and neither is Social Media. They will circle each other many times, finally acknowledge that the other exists, and find a way to get along. You need to spend your ad dollars and promotional dollars with that in mind, understanding that your audience, the people who matter, are never going to make an “either or” decision and you shouldn’t either.
- Net Neutrality Live. (For Now.)
Just to be clear on what happened this week: the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Internet service providers are “common carriers” and can thus be regulated by the FCC.That was it. Why It MattersThe FCC’s authority over pretty much anything has never been clear. It’s a federal regulatory agency and so lives in that gray area between “has a lot of authority” and “says a lot of things no one really has to pay attention to.”So most of the lawsuits around these regulatory agencies actually involve determining what the FCC and others can and can’t legally do. This week the court said, yes, they can regulate Internet service providers (ISPs) since they are “common carriers” just like phone companies and it’s already been determined that the FCC can regulate phone companies. One of the ways the FCC has already said (for many years now) they want to regulate ISPs is to enforce the doctrine of net neutrality, whereby providers do not get to create paid fast lanes and slow lanes and so this week’s ruling was good news for Team Net Neutrality.Depending on who you talk to, net neutrality is either a very wise doctrine that protects consumers and start-ups or unnecessary interference because the internet is so vast there are no such things as slow lanes. (Ted Cruz is one of the leading voices against net neutrality if that helps.) What You Need To Do About ItSit tight and keep the champagne on ice. The MPVDs are going to appeal this decision and there’s a good chance it will wind up being decided by the Supreme Court. So nothing is set in stone just yet, and it may be a full year until it is.
