The long tail of CTV is often associated with low-quality inventory, but Rebecca Smithson, Head of AV Strategy & Planning at Havas Media Network, says some CTV publishers do little to help that reputation when they pitch to agencies. While largely keen to discuss their tech offering, certain publishers have a habit of neglecting to divulge the actual content they are showing.
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Smithson explores the shortcomings in how CTV is sold to buyers, the importance of an audience-led approach to AV planning, and the need for publicly outspoken industry figures.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
You must hear this quite a lot, but we don’t have standardised definitions when it comes to CTV. It’s sometimes presented as a really niche part of the AV landscape, when essentially it’s everything that’s on our TV screens except for linear. It’s all of BVOD, SVOD, FAST channels, it’s such a big ecosystem, and we just don’t have the language for it.
So many of my meetings that I have with clients start with, this is how I’m defining each component of this ecosystem, because it’s going to be different from the language they might use, or the language their previous agency used. So getting clear language is something that we really need to do as an industry; I don’t know who needs to lead on that, but it’s something that we need to collectively decide on, so that we can all know that we’re talking about the same thing.
The other side of CTV that I have a bit of a bugbear with is around how it is sold to AV buyers. Much of the beauty of CTV is that it’s bringing together big-screen premium content alongside really sophisticated targeting technologies. And so often when I’m talking to CTV publishers, all they’re talking to me about is data, targeting and technology, and they are completely omitting the content side of the conversation. If I ask about the content they have, or what I can be excited to watch on a particular FAST channel, I get lots of blank looks sometimes.
I feel like some of the CTV long tail gets a bit of a bad rep in terms of its quality and its content. But I don’t think the publishers are necessarily helping themselves by not talking about the content that they are delivering. A lot of it’s going to be great but they’re not telling us what it is! If it’s a niche channel that I’m not necessarily going to watch by myself, I need to be able to talk confidently to my clients about what their offering is, and they can only talk to me about what technology they have.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
It’s evolved enormously. We’re still media buyers, planners and strategists, but especially for Havas, our capabilities are so wide and so broad, when we’re looking at experiential, social, commerce, gaming, data, content, creative, measurement and all the bits around the edges that are necessary to create a total communications package, we’re almost in the realm of marketing support agencies and not just media agencies. We are having to develop expertise in so many areas. Otherwise you end up with communication silos for advertisers.
So it’s expanded enormously, and it’s got incredibly complicated, but it’s also got incredibly interesting and incredibly exciting. And we are exposed to different components that perhaps ten years ago we might not have been, because they remained very separate entities.
Which do you think video advertising is the most effective for – generating awareness and brand-building, or driving short-term sales?
I think it’s too simplistic to try to designate an entire media channel as either brand or performance. There are so many variables at play, and as an industry we’ve become a bit too attached to assigning these single-minded roles to channels, and it’s just not that simple. Yes, video has historically been wonderful at driving awareness, and it continues to do that. But brand activity also drives short-term sales, and short-term sales activity also drives an impact for the brand. So trying to create this delineation between the two isn’t really that helpful.
I also think that within the video ecosystem itself, it’s not just the fact that it’s video that’s making it more or less effective for one outcome or the other, it’s how we use it. So different messaging, different formats, different creative, these will all impact whether or not something has a greater effect on brand or sales, rather than the whole channel of video itself. So while it has a long history of being useful for driving awareness, that’s not to say we should just disregard how powerful it is for other metrics as well.
And I think we also need to be really mindful of how formats and technologies are completely collapsing the funnel as well. So what traditionally might have been a brand channel for a traditional advertiser is now able to integrate shopping formats and add-to-basket formats. So what is brand advertising anymore, if you can just put it straight into your basket? So I think we need to be much more nuanced about what we’re trying to achieve for individual campaigns, and how we use individual channels to achieve that, rather than trying to say this is only a performance channel, or this is only a brand channel.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
It very much sits within the domain of the AV team. We operate an integrated video framework, so with the viewer experience at the heart of that framework. Viewers do not distinguish between video channels by the trading mechanic or the buying route or its legacy heritage, and we shouldn’t be planning ads based on that either. We’re trying to reach people, so we plan holistically, and CTV is one part of a much bigger ecosystem. They can’t be planned in silos.
That’s not to ignore the fact that there are a lot of different skill sets when it comes to activating the different components, and so many different specialisms. So when we’re talking about integrated video at Havas, we’re not just talking about integrated planning; we’re talking about integrated activation and reporting, and making sure that all the relevant specialisms and teams can come together around individual campaigns – rather than campaigns around teams – to get the relevant skill sets together to activate as fully holistic AV teams.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
It’s changed it enormously. Historically AV strategies were built around incremental reach, chasing the reach lost from linear, and adding on layer after layer after layer of media channels. AV is no longer purely about reach, and non-linear solutions are no longer just secondary considerations to linear.
As I mentioned before, we’re very audience-led around our approach to AV. So in order to maintain an approach that can continue to live as the AV landscape evolves, we have become explicitly audience-led rather than channel-led. So, who are the audience? What makes them tick? How can we reach them authentically? If we’re going to write a list of all the channels that mean the most to them, what has the most influence? What will be at the top? This approach enables us to curate channel mixes that reflect viewing behaviour, and don’t reflect legacy frameworks that start with linear at the top and put search at the bottom. That’s how it’s always been. I think the industry really needs to move away from this very rigid model of how we conceptualise media plans, and actually start putting the audience back at the heart of it.
There’s so much change, but one thing doesn’t change, and that’s the need to focus on the audience and how we reach them meaningfully, authentically, and give them a positive experience. All the change has made us hyper-focused on that, to keep the audience at the heart of what we’re doing.
Which ad tech solution has delivered the most impact for your business?
I think one of the biggest challenges around a lot of media is that we have this incredibly valuable and detailed understanding of our audience, but when we come to actually activating against the audience, we are bound by what is buyable and what is tradable. You have these deep audience profiles, and then you go to Channel Four and buy 16-34, adults. And that’s always been a historical gap that has existed in the industry.
At Havas we’ve bridged that gap through a product called Converged Activate. We have partnered directly with the likes of the broadcasters, with Amazon, with Netflix, to directly integrate our own data with their data, and build cohorts of our people that we’re trying to reach, and reach those people directly. So we’re no longer based on proxies, or modelling out, or “what tradeable audience is most like this complex audience that we’ve built up here?”. We are able to directly activate against those cohorts. That is such a profound and important shift when it comes to media planning, because there’s always been this gap in activation. And I think having successfully bridged that gap, and seen such phenomenal results from our clients who utilise it, has been one of the most interesting things in the last couple of years from a Havas perspective.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
Not that long ago I would have purely said reach. But the metrics that matter are very much dependent on the campaign, what we’re trying to achieve, and who we’re trying to reach. So reach is important, but so are other metrics that are harder to measure, such as the quality of the content, targeting capabilities, attention, relevance or resonance. There are so many considerations that we could take into account, and we need to make sure that we are measuring the right things that we need to be measuring in order to achieve what we’re trying to achieve.
I think regardless of whichever media metric we are measuring and optimising, we need to remain mindful that they are all just a means to an end goal. They are not the end goal in itself. If I’m trying to optimise a campaign to reach, reach is not the end goal. The client’s business outcomes are the end goal. It’s one of those slightly fluffy planner answers I’m afraid, in that it depends on the brief, but I think that’s what we need to do. We need to remain nuanced depending on what we’re trying to achieve.
What could publishers, broadcasters and pay-TV companies do to compete more effectively with the tech giants?
I think TV has got such a legacy of being cumbersome and slow, and difficult to activate, difficult to change once you’re live, difficult to make quick decisions about, and difficult to get insight on what’s happening as a result of your TV in the short-term. In order to really compete with the Big Tech giants, I think the TV industry needs to make the world easier, more flexible, more accessible, shorter lead times. Remove the bunfight for programming and positioning. There has to be a better way to trade it and activate it that will facilitate much more frictionless activation for advertisers.
We do remain constrained by the supply and demand mechanic that linear TV still has to operate in. And as long as there is fixed minutage and changing demand, there’s no immediate solution to that. But outside of linear, and I think the broadcasters are getting much better at this, it needs to be made easier, more flexible, accessible, and with more visibility on what’s happening immediately. I think Project Lantern is going to be an interesting solution to start to see short-term outcomes from TV campaigns. There are so many components, but just making it easier for everybody would be the biggest single thing they could do to compete.
Which person in the industry inspires you the most today?
I’m not going to name names, but I always love listening to those people who are not afraid to publicly call out bullshit, and aren’t afraid to deviate from the status quo. I think as an industry, we all tend to jump on the same bandwagons, and then we all end up being echo chambers of everyone agreeing with each other and patting ourselves on the back. So when you have a maverick getting on stage and calling out bullshit, I really enjoy that, and I think it’s really important that we continue to have people out there who are not afraid to put their head above the parapet, and are not afraid to not toe the company line. The danger is we all get stuck in this homogenous way of thinking, and nothing will really progress if we’re all thinking the same way and doing the same things.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
This is a slightly impossible question. I’ve been involved in campaigns that took home every single award going, and I’ve been involved with campaigns where the budget was tiny, and the entire company sit around to watch their first ad go out and cheer. And both of those extremes of campaigns have brought me an enormous sense of pride.
At the end of the day, the pride comes from doing the good work to drive good change. And doing it in a way that is authentic and human and not full of jargon, and actually makes differences to businesses and the people who work there, and making sure that the audiences that we’re trying to reach are having as positive an experience as they can out of the work that we’re forcing onto their TV screens.
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