As AI disrupts the media planning process, Mediaplus UK (formerly Total Media) is seeing the technology enhance its video capabilities by enabling the agency to test multiple creatives at scale. And while AI stands to take control of lower-funnel budgets, this shift could end up strengthening the power of TV advertising, according to Kieren Mills, Head of Broadcast at Mediaplus UK.
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Mills discusses the impact of AI on video advertising, the need for media planners to engage with the channels where they run ads, and the broadcasters getting a “second chance” to compete with tech giants.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
I don’t think it’s a particularly uncommon view, but a lot of the jargon and acronyms that surround the industry, like OTT, CTV… I get why it’s important on the channel side; you’re not on carriage anymore, you don’t have to pay Sky loads of money to be on there, so it opens up the world of TV.
But from an advertising perspective, I don’t care about the delivery method, and I don’t really care too much about a lot of the jargon and terminology. To me it’s really simple. I look at it like the person on the street looks at it. They don’t know what they’ve seen an ad on, they’ll just make a decision based on how that product makes them feel when they’re at the point of purchase or in that cycle.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
There’s now a lot more complexity. When I started 20 years ago, you could buy a Coronation Street and reach 40 percent of the housewives with kids audience, and then you’d back it up with some other spots on Sky. And that would shift the dial. And then you look at what you have to achieve now, 20 years later. It’s so fragmented, so we’ve got to be experts in so many different areas. And to be honest, it’s too difficult for anyone to be an expert in all these areas, so you need to have that level of specialism but also also a level of generalisation, so you can match the options up and explain that in a succinct way to a client.
Which do you think video advertising is the most effective for – generating awareness and brand building, or driving short-term sales?
You look at the various studies on video advertising, you see why it’s been so successful, taking so much share of revenue over the years – it’s for brand building. Some of the money was initially for direct response TV (DRTV), but it’s always been brand building. And the reason it works so well is the same reason we sat around the fire telling stories hundreds of thousands of years ago; listening and looking at the same time allows you to really tell that story more effectively than just a picture or audio or any other communication. It enables brands to tell their story, and if they do it well, it’s really powerful.
DRTV and the growth of targeting capabilities moves TV down to the mid-funnel, and then it can even play a role in the lower funnel. But what I say to my advertisers is there are other things that can do that cheaper to drive that sale. When you’re ready to take that next step up and not just living for the short-term, and you’re seeing that long-term branding, just remember you’re getting 15 or 30 seconds to tell that story. So it’s not going to be the cheapest thing when you’re looking at your ROIs and how it’s all stacking up. But when you include it as part of that mix, it can be a really strong step to getting you to where you ultimately want to be, which is a consistent, high-impact brand advertiser. So it can play that role, but I’ve always looked at it as brand building.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
This is the conundrum everyone is trying to solve! A bit like I said about the terminology, clients don’t really care about that. The way we break it down is, what are we actually using the medium for? And going back to my bugbears, sometimes people see video as an objective. It’s not an objective, it’s a tactic that we use to meet our real objectives. So what am I using it for? If I’m using it for awareness, reach, saliency, that kind of top of funnel metric, then it makes sense for the broadcast teams, or the offline team, to be dealing with it, because they’ve got the experience, they can evaluate a CTV offering. What’s it going to cost? What’s the quality of the impact? What’s the frequency control? How does it sit within the rest of my overall video strategy? That’s including things like cinema, it should all be looked at now as video; it’s almost one media, it’s beyond video. It’s wherever I can get that message across. And we’ve got to make sure that’s optimised to reach as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible for our clients. And that can vary wildly. So that’s my heartland, that’s where I’ve grown up, and we’ve got experience in that.
When we come into some of those lower-funnel metrics, that’s where our digital team take over, because they’re looking at what conversions they’re getting in other channels, so they can make a better estimate on how it’s performing. They’ve got the skills to optimise that, choose where they’re going to buy it, buy it programmatically etc. So for us it’s really about, what are we trying to achieve from that particular bit of activity, and then who has the skill set and the knowledge to activate that to meet those client goals?
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
It gives us more options from an awareness standpoint. There’s always been that reach. I think my main concern was probably about four or five years ago, when the SVOD services were cannibalising audience, and I couldn’t advertise on them; that’s dead audience to me. Now they’re advertising, and that’s great – again, I don’t really care about the delivery method if I can get that reach.
But I think what it’s really opened up is video as an effective conversion channel. So we’ve got our broad reach, we might play a brand ad that’s conveying that brand message that we want to get across. Where it opens up video is I can now segment that audience. So if I’m looking at one of our car clients, I can have my glossy ad with the car driving around, wind in the hair, all that awareness piece. And then I can follow that up with more targeted messages. So actually, when we break down that target audience, there could be a young 25-year-old in London that wants to buy that car, and we know that being environmentally conscious is important to them, so when we know they’re in market we can play a message that matters to them. And then for a 45-year-old, we can play safety. And with the advancements in creative as we go into the AI world, that’s going to be more and more commonplace, and we’ll have thousands and thousands of lines that we can test.
What could agencies do better to help clean up the industry?
On a micro level, for just one person in the industry, my advice would be to watch what you’re selling. There are so many people that don’t bother watching the channels they buy. But I’ve got to have a look. I’ve got to understand the product, understand the quality, understand the quality of the advertising, the frequency they deliver. If someone’s offering me targeting solutions or they bang on about their targeting, and I go onto their platform and there’s no ads that appeal to me any more than mass reach, then I know their targeting is not worth me paying any type of premium for it. And I can make that decision. Quite often, people are out there selling stuff to their clients, and they haven’t seen the experience through the consumer’s eyes.
And on a macro level it’s tough. We need collaboration across all interested parties, the advertisers, the agencies, they need to confront the fraud in the industry. It’s serious, and we need to care about tackling it.
Which ad tech solution has delivered the most impact for your business?
Our creative AI platform gives us the opportunity to deploy multiple creatives at scale, across multiple formats, and then see what performs, and then obviously scale up the ones that do and take back the ones that don’t. And that falls into the consideration piece. So that’s been a big step forward in the quality of our video capabilities in that mid-funnel area. And again, it’s going to be so fascinating over the next 15, 20 years, in terms of the amount of creative variance you’re going to be able to have, the amount of testing. And then how do we test all this when the data is coming in real-time, quicker than I can comprehend? What are the guard rails? It’s going to be really interesting to see how it goes.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
From my broadcast background, reach and subsequently attention are generally the things that I’m mostly interested in. Lower- or mid-funnel, I’m mostly interested in outcomes, as best they can be proved right now and as that moves forward. It’s a real mix because with outcomes, you want to measure how they perform in the short- to mid-term, but I come from a broadcast background, where you’re looking at sustainable growth over two years. Some of the best TV spots, you won’t get any spike in web traffic, but if it’s half-time in the football I don’t expect it, because we’re just trying to entertain them or tell our story for 30 seconds while they get onto something they’re really interested in.
So it’s about getting that kind of balance, and making sure that data is not everything. You can apply data and apply logic and make your plans more targeted and refined. But a good old-fashioned, strong creative based on really good consumer insight, told in an interesting way and delivered at scale, but with accuracy, consistently over time, with the right format – I just see the sustainable growth it delivers. Sometimes you get caught up in the day-to-day, but when you get those nice stories of all those bits coming together, it makes you realise it’s not that difficult sometimes.
What could publishers, broadcasters and pay TV companies do to compete more effectively with the tech giants?
Last week we saw Amazon come out and incorporate Netflix into their DSP. It’s a real battlefield out there, and the biggest beasts generally tend to win. Back in the day we had this digital revolution, and these tech giants sprung up to the beasts that they are today. And you had ITV buying Friends Reunited and things like that. The broadcasters and pay-TV companies missed the boat there. And it’s very rare in business that you get a second chance, but there is a possibility that there is going to be another boat. You’re going to have AI coming in, potentially AI agents that are going to replace some of that lower-funnel budget for the tech giants, and making purchase decisions. Then branding becomes really important, because you can’t really advertise to a machine, so I feel like branded search will become more important in an LLM world. So then the strengths of the broadcasters, the ones that create the content, really come back into play, and the power of their advertising should get stronger.
So I think they’re in a nice position to get another bite of the cherry, but they’ve got to learn from what happened before – which they have done, too late the first time round, but it’s about consolidation. You could be a big beast in one market, but to compete with them, you need to be across markets. So it’s a collaboration between various companies, making yourself as big as you can. And then learning from the mistakes, as I mentioned about Friends Reunited. Know what you are, know what you can do, what you can compete with well; you aren’t going to compete with the tech giants on the tech play, on the data capabilities. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but as they get bigger, it’s going to become more and more difficult. Who can you partner with? I don’t want to partner with Google or Meta because they’re going to eat my lunch, but maybe there’s something we can do with OpenAI for example. How can we do what we’re good at, which is producing great content, building channel brands, to get brands noticed and discussed with OpenAI? But understanding we need to band together, and find partners in that space that can help us compete on an even footing.
Which person in the industry inspires you the most today?
I don’t have one person but I want to mention the board here at Mediaplus. We’re a B Corp, and when I first joined in September when it was Total Media, there was an offer from a company that would be very un-B Corp. And the vast sums of money they wanted to pump into the market very quickly would have really moved the dial on the performance of the business in that year. And it could have been masked, if they really wanted to do it. One of our values is integrity, doing the right thing when no one’s watching. And to be honest, I thought they would take the money and run, because that’s a lot of the stuff I’ve experienced before. But they turned them down, and I saw these are actually values and not just stuff you stick on a mouse mat. That was really refreshing and good to see, and it’s part of the reason I’m still here.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
A previous client I used to work on was Thatchers Cider. I was really proud of them, because I grew up about ten miles away from where it was produced, and when I was a young lad going to pubs it was just some pump on the back of the barrel that had no gas in it. It was just a small outfit. That was the one I wanted to work on, it was like my Apple brand (excuse the pun), so it was great getting to help grow it through video activity. They were doing regional because they had heartlands, so we had to take them on that regional journey, then build it up over time, take them national, then higher-profile national spots. The creative was always on point, and it wasn’t a rush, it wasn’t everything has to be right now. As a family business, it’s about that sustainable growth that we pride ourselves on here. So it’s very much doing the right thing over time, being sensible, having that patience and letting it come, and the results speak for themselves now.
And transferring that onto a client I’ve got now would be AJ Bell. We’ve got really strong creative from Pablo, it’s distinctive, it’s unique, it’s got a sonic logo, which means I can recreate it cheaply on audio; the Ring My Bell song, it’s really catchy. It’s got well-planned, strongly thought-out execution to make sure we show it to the right number of people the right number of times, and then we use the right media for a conversion. So it’s all the basics coming together, and you see the market share, the profitability growing over time, everything’s moving in the right direction. And it’s really satisfying to see that when it comes together, and you’re happy to see what’s coming next and to grow with them.
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