Advertising and media industry cognoscenti gathered in New York last week for the annual Advertising Week gabfest, with even more than the usual contrast of burgeoning optimism and environmental agita. For every onstage utterance that “there’s never been a better time to be in the business” there were five more backstage conversations with and about long-time colleagues hoofing for new gigs. It ain’t easy out there (or in here).
This is hardly an unknown phenomenon – I believe broadcast TV was first pronounced dead during the time of Aristotle – but you do feel an ever-heightened sense of urgency from marketers, agencies, and content creators and distributors of all flavors. Did this year’s Advertising Week, or the New York Media Festival’s “Future of TV” (there still is one!) help in lending any clarity to the complicated picture? Here’s one man’s take of a few key insights both live and in color.
No more Chief Marketing Officers?
Even as the average tenure of Chief Marketing Officers has declined in recent years, their status as the “celebrity chefs” of the advertising world has only intensified. Few jobs have been more challenging in recent years as CMOs must grapple with the mind-boggling complexity of the media marketplace, the massive disruptions of consumer behavior in physical and retail commercial environments, and an ever more harrowing relationship with long-trusted agency partners. As Dana Treseder, CMO of GE Ventures stated at Ad Week, “there is still a place for the artist,” but a CMO is far more than a “marketer” these days.
The CMO’s job today is less about being a “creative” in the old-fashioned advertising sense than the exercise of extraordinary creativity in developing the right marketing technology stack, assembling the right mix of 1st party and external data, producing executable responses to those data insights, and constructing a far better understanding for your entire company of who your consumer is, how they behave, and how to best connect with them. The CMOs I heard speak including Ty Shay of Norton LifeLock and Aditi Gokhale of Northwestern Mutual (as well as Treseder) ruminated that in the future a more accurate title for their job might be Chief Customer Officer, Chief Data Analyst, or even Chief Understanding Officer (OK, a little out there, but you get the idea).
Content may still be King, but distribution is God (or at least a very powerful Queen)
Original media content (never mind the library stuff) is everywhere – on every network, every platform, every device and in every conceivable genre. One of my favorite lines of the week came from Evan Shapiro, former IFC TV and NBCUniversal executive and now a multi-platform independent television producer, who told his Future of TV audience: “If you’re watching content that you don’t like, you’ve either had a stroke or you hate yourself.”
Of course, the proliferation of content is providing not just massive opportunity (“so exciting to be in the business right now”) but accelerating challenges for media companies and for marketers. The FX network calculated that a record 487 scripted TV series aired in 2017, which is great for producers in the short term, but as Shapiro pointed out, since Netflix launched House of Cards, the viewing of the average hour of TV programming has declined by 30-40% while costs have increased dramatically (lots more buyers in the market). Sorry, everybody, but that is not sustainable economics.
The challenge of distributing content has grown for both content producers and distributors, not to mention for advertisers and agencies. As Jonathan Skogmo, CEO of digital native Jukin Media pointed, out, unless you have a significant proprietary distribution platform, you not only lack the audience scale that advertisers demand but the first party data that enhances your value to those advertisers. And distribution is a hard-fought battle for not just for entertainment content, but for advertising messages as well. I heard from Sarah Stringer, Head of Innovation for Dentsu's Carat USA, who emphasized that “unless you put significant dollars behind media distribution,” it doesn’t matter how creative your messaging is – no one’s going to hear it.
On the other hand, there’s Nike – and Colin Kaepernick
Perhaps as a bit of counter to the challenge of getting your story to resonate in our cacophonous media marketplace, we have Nike’s already-historic ad campaign featuring former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In case you missed the commercial or any discussion of it (really?), Kaepernick drew fire as the first National Football League player to kneel during the national anthem as a protest of incidents of police brutality. More than a year after this, Nike created a spot for the 30th anniversary of its “Just Do It” slogan, highlighting Kaepernick among a group of athletes celebrated for their courage.
Nike struck a sonorous chord, especially with young consumers. No matter your politics, the impact of this one ad campaign has been stunning, with Nike merchandise sales soaring and the company’s market cap rising by over $6 billion in a matter of weeks. There’s a ton of viral gold here that goes way beyond any conventional media buy, although predicting an impact like that takes more art (not to mention luck and probably a little voodoo) rather than data science. But it should hearten those who still wonder if advertising and creativity can still break through today.
