The Calm Before The Storm, The Absurdity Of Social Video Measurement
1. The Calm Before The Storm
2024 was a fairly monumental year for the television industry. It seemed like every week brought a new chapter in the industry’s transformation, and the result was more than a bit soap operatic, what with mergers, bankruptcies, new players, new technologies and the like.
And then this year? Pretty much crickets.
I was wondering if it was just that I’d become jaded, but then I was recording an episode of the Media Odyssey podcast with Marion Ranchet (look for it next month) and she made a similar observation, and I thought, oh good, it’s not just me.
So why the slowdown? Is the industry regaining a level of stability, are great big deals just lurking around the corner or is everyone just keeping their finger on the pause button waiting to see how certain events will play out.
Yes.
Why It Matters
Yes, as in all three responses are correct. There are some big deals coming down the pike, Paramount/Skydance being the best known among them.
Though timing on that deal is now delayed 90 days, thanks, in large part, to a lawsuit against the CBS show 60 Minutes filed by reason number two: Donald Trump.
The rapid-fire nature of the executive orders coming from the White House impacts the entire media industry quite bigly. Trade wars and shifting relations with American allies mean American TV shows and movies—and American media companies—fear being seen less favorably overseas. Ditto all the American companies whose advertising ultimately fuels our domestic market.
Uncertainty means that deals don’t get considered, let alone completed. And while there is a lot of wishful thinking on the order of “the worst of it is now over,” anyone who’s been paying attention for the past nine years knows that’s unlikely to be the case.
We have 45 months and nine days of Interesting Times ahead of us.
The final reason for all the quiet is far more banal: the industry is at a plateau right now and catching its breath for a bit, Trump or no Trump.
This is a common development in any industry undergoing rapid change: the chart, if you will, does not look like a diagonal line or even a hockey stick, but rather, a series of upwards surges followed by plateaus.
The plateaus are valuable because they give everyone, consumers included, a chance to catch up. To figure out what is working within the New World Order, what is not. I’ve spoken before about the various streaming services figuring out what they want to be when they grow up. Well now they're adolescents and their personalities are really coming into focus. We can start to see how they are all unique entities and not just another flavor of Netflix.
Ditto the big media companies and the TV arms of the tech companies. Like a Monet seen from far away, the brush strokes are starting to come into focus and we have a better view of what they are and what they want to be.
Call it TV’s moment of enforced clarity.
Regardless, the real action in TV right now is around a much broader set of companies taking advantage of advertising on the medium thanks to the availability of data that allows for more targeted advertising.
That takes the form of everything from retail ads on CTV to LinkedIn’s run at the B2B market to the numerous SMB initiatives that have sprung up to take advantage of the ability of AI to create decent-enough looking commercials.
And AI—and all the multiple disruptions it will bring—is where the future lies.
What You Need To Do About It
It’s still too early to understand the full impact AI will have on the industry, what it will change and when.
But if you’re looking for the next big set of tectonic plate shifts, that’s clearly where it is going to come from.
Right now, we’re still in early days. ChatGPT still thinks every idea you have is genius and constantly rewrites everything, even when all you want to know is if you have the dates right.
Only at some point, it will get past all that and the action will pick up again.
Which means that what you need to do more than anything is just to stay on top of it.
Really stay on top of it.
Not just a couple of articles you see posted on LinkedIn or the New York Times website, but really dive in. Assign people to figure out what is being done that may affect you and who is doing it. Make sure you know what’s possible and then, when the next round of action starts up, you won’t get taken by surprise.
Just remember the Albanian Army and all that’s gone on in the intervening 15 years.
And know that this time the change cycle is going to be much, much faster.
2. The Absurdity Of Social Video Measurement
There was an article at TheVerge this week all about the absolutely nonsensical ways that social media platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok measure video views.
Few of which seem to actually involve people, you know, watching the videos as much as side-eyeing them as they slide by in their feed or pausing a half second before indicating “no, not that!”)
That has everything to do with the arms race that has them all picking shorter and more forced definitions of what a “view” actually is. And how that virus is spreading to television, where Netflix has moved all the way from a view is someone who has completed 70% of a given show to the current definition of someone who has watched for just two minutes. Which, if we’re looking at an hour-long show, means they’ve gone from 42 minutes to just two.
Though given the competition, can you really blame them?
Why It Matters
As Zoomers and their elders spend more and more time on social video, their parent companies have put on a full court press to convince the industry to consider them “TV.”
Not “TV adjacent” or “TV equivalent” but just “TV.”
They’ve been aided in this argument by a steady drumbeat of Nielsen numbers that show more people watch YouTube on their living room TV than watch Netflix.
And no, they’re not all watching cat videos.
So when Netflix sees that YouTube Shorts has joined Instagram and TikTok in counting that millisecond when a video starts playing—even if you immediately scroll to the next video—as a “view”, it’s not surprising that their response is not “we’ll see your millisecond versus our 42 minutes”—2.52 million milliseconds, in case you were counting.
But rather, to come down to two minutes (120K milliseconds) and figure they’re still leagues more accurate.
It all points out something that has been glaringly obvious for the past ten years, something that gets talked about non-stop on acronym-laced panels… and never seems to get resolved: measurement is broken.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are an advertiser, a big advertiser in particular, I am afraid this one is on you: get together, pick a number, and stick to it. Don’t cave or tell them you were just playing 8D chess and they actually have 90 more days.
But pick a number—or a percentage—and tell them that this is what a view is and that unless they can give you stats based on that definition, they are not getting any of your money.
Make it a big PR push. Figure out what an influencer is and get them on your side too—those numbers impact them as well.
Stand your ground because the tech companies will not cave easily and feel they have the president’s ear. At least this week.
But know that it will be worth it because in the end you’ll actually be paying for people who have seen your ad.
Just don’t be shocked if they’re not the people you thought.
