Le Grand Review De MIPCOM

MIPCOM and Lions both take place in Cannes during a time of year when the weather is ideally warm and sunny, but that is about the extent of the overlap. While the latter is mostly notable for grotesque excesses by companies that don’t seem the least bit troubled by the optics of their Robin Leachian adventures, MIPCOM is all about realism and understanding how the massive changes streaming has wrought affect the ebb and flow of content and rights deals across the globe.

This difference likely stems from their origins: Lions began life as an award show for advertising creatives that was always regarded as something of a scam in that community—having worked on the creative end of the ad business for 15+ years, I can assure you that a One Show or British D&AD award was far more prestigious and that the award ceremony for both of those shows was limited to a few hours in a not-all-that-glamorous auditorium somewhere in New York or London.

But back to the award show thing—it was intended to be a “celebration” e.g. a whole lot of people patting themselves on the back because of how clever they were. And there is a direct line from that to the increasingly desperate attempts by media and ad tech companies to prove that their pockets are every bit as deep and lined with gold as Google and Meta’s.

Or, to broaden it out, the One Percent trying to keep up with the Point One Percent in a farce straight out of Tom Wolfe.

Compare that to MIPCOM, which is first and foremost a marketplace, and marketplaces, by their nature, are all about dollars, or, in this case, euros and pounds.

And yet…

The themes I heard discussed this week will not surprise any of you. And if they do, well that’s on you.

We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately

If there is one theme that looms head and shoulders above the rest it is the massive fragmentation in the industry that results in everyone pulling in their own direction and not even making an attempt to work together.

This is a problem when your main competitors are monopolies who don’t have to worry about collaborating with anyone.

In more practical terms, it means that the market is very confusing for two key constituencies: advertisers and consumers.

Advertisers are essentially being told they’re on their own. That the various media companies are all going to do their own thing in terms of everything from measurement to transparency, and it is up to them to figure it all out, to make apple-to-apples comparisons out of something that feels a lot like apples-to-elephants. And ignore the fact that many of their advertisers just want reach, not precise targeting. Given that those advertisers target is often “everyone with a mouth” not “red-haired Pilates enthusiasts who have bought something from our DTC website in the last six months.” 

So there’s that.

Consumers get dissed even harder. Starting with the “Commercial break in progress” notices that lead many of them to think that the app is somehow broken which is why the ad didn’t show up.

All the way up to the inability to find most of the shows they want to watch without resorting to Google, because the media companies won’t let anyone create a viable universal interface.

So there’s that too, and the result is that both groups will ultimately spend less time with TV—advertisers will spend their money on YouTube, TikTok and other digital video platforms and consumers will spend their time on those platforms, on podcasts and on gaming.

So that’s the bad news.

The good news is that there’s a whole lot of innovation going on, most all of it around AI, most of which is aimed at ameliorating the greater problem.

AI is being used to create better advertising processes by tagging and indexing content so that advertisers can run their ads in contextually relevant ad pods. (Meaning that your funny ad comes after the funny scene or that your pizza ad comes after a food-ordering scene.)

It’s being used to create better search and discovery so that what is recommended is actually what people want to see and library content doesn’t just disappear into the morass.

It’s being used to provide better measurement of the sort that advertisers have been demanding and then taking those stats and optimizing the remaining inventory. 

So that’s the good news out of MIPCOM, and it should help some.

The other news is that—surprise—not everyone who cobbled together some content and stood up a FAST channel is going to become a millionaire, and, in fact, many will not make it, and many more will get swallowed up in a wave of consolidations of the sort that happen in every industry when there are just too many players.

Finally there is the growing acknowledgment that the TV OS matters. That OS owners have become operators in their own right, able to gate keep content, provide their own unique ad experiences, and their own unique user experiences and that while it may not ultimately impact which TV a user buys, it does matter.

Which is likely why events put on by major TV OS owners like Samsung (an OEM) and Titan (a white label solution) drew such big crowds.

The other events that drew big crowds were the MIP Innovation Lab sessions on AI, FAST and CTV. I had the honor of hosting/emceeing/keynoting that latter and when you can get around 200 people to show up at 9AM on the third day of a European conference, you know you’ve struck a chord.

I’d like to flatter myself by thinking they showed up to see me, but the reality is they showed up because they get that all this is important and they need to educate themselves about it before it’s too late.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re the ad industry, you need to start collaborating more. Which means meeting the content people halfway and sending scouts to events like MIPCOM and the Stream TV Show to get a sense of what the people who are, for all intents and purposes, your partners are thinking.

If you’re the content industry, you need to think of advertising as an essential part of what you do and not a necessary evil and try and bring them on board and collaborate more.

And if you’re the major media companies, you need to get your heads out of your asses and realize that you are not going to “win”, that there will, in fact, be no “winners” and that collaboration and cooperation are the only ways you stand a chance of defeating your true enemies who are Google, Amazon and Meta. With a little Bytedance, Microsoft and Apple thrown in for kicks. 

This is not something you can put off for much longer. 

But in your heart of hearts, you already know that.