The variety of objectives in video and CTV campaigns means measurement metrics can range from completed views all the way to outcomes. But media quality metrics “equally matter”, according to Dave Sargent, UK Head of AV at Mindshare, since measuring inventory quality helps maintain high production standards and lowers the risk of ad fraud.
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Sargent discusses the dilution of CTV inventory, the unification of video buys across agency teams, and the role of different streaming services and broadcasters in the content space.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
There is so much jargon and over-complication when it comes to CTV. I think CTV inventory can often get diluted down by non-CTV inventory. At it’s purest level it should be fairly simple, in the sense that CTV should be internet-delivered content consumed on a TV set. Often that becomes open to interpretation where it really shouldn’t be.
I completely understand that there’s a subjective element in terms of the quality of content that sits in that profile. And there’s a lot of conversation around what’s worthy and what’s not. Certainly for us the focus is always going to be around content with solid to very high production quality and editorial governance. But for others, it might be more just about eyeballs and audience. But really beyond that, I think CTV should be fairly easy to identify and talk about.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
I’m not entirely sure if the role of the agency has drastically changed over the last ten years. I think it’s still about delivering our clients the best possible media planning, buying and insights. I suspect what has changed quite a lot in that time is how we do that.
If I think back maybe 15 years ago, you had really distinguishable teams; you had a TV team, a print team, an OOH team, a radio team, a digital team. It was very siloed. But I think video has now made that so joined up, in the sense that video is across all those buy types now. And so the focus has become more about, how do we unify that? Where are the opportunities? And within that, there’s been a real emergence of data and analytics, and higher adoption of technology, and a shift towards outcome-based performance. So there’s a lot going on in that space. But really, I think that’s just an adjustment to client needs and the market itself, rather than a fundamental shift in our role.
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 brilliant at doing both. There’s a lot of research in market that supports that. And certainly what we’ve seen from clients, from their econometrics or MMM learnings or just their internal data, suggests that video does a fantastic job at both. And it’s really dependent on where you’re focusing it within the brief. So I don’t think it has to be pigeon-holed into one place or another. I think it can be brilliant at driving brand-building, and can also be fantastic at driving short-term sales. I also think it works really well together in doing both.
Even going back quite a few years now, you can see the impact TV had on search, where the campaign carried a slogan or strapline that then would become heavily searched. So the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The role they can play together is quite powerful.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
At the moment, CTV primarily sits between AV and programmatic. In the last few years, we’ve seen more BVOD and AVOD inventory becoming available in multiple DSPs and direct buys. So from an AV perspective, the focus for us over the last two or three years has been working a lot more closely with our programmatic peers – not just within agency, but we’ve had a couple of big work streams across all the opcos, where we’ve pulled together our leads in those spaces, and tried to bring our best-in-class thinking to get to a place where we have common principles and approaches.
So at the moment, there’s no real land-grab in terms of who runs it. And from my focus, my interest is not so much who is hitting Enter on the keyboard to send the IO over to the sales house. I’m more interested in how we plan it in a collaborative way that avoids siloed planning and buying, and brings a collective approach to CTV. Ultimately the client just wants a really simplified, easy-to-understand media plan. They don’t want lots of component parts, when it can be neatly joined up and, again, not over-complicated.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
The really quick and easy answer would be, it offers an opportunity for incremental reach through the fragmentation that we’ve seen in AV consumption. But really, our TV buying is still from the ground up. So every channel has to justify its place on the plan, proving that it can add cost-efficient, incremental cover as we go. And so then when we get to the point where TV becomes exhausted, or you start to notice diminishing returns, CTV is a fantastic way of increasing that. But again, the same principles apply that each channel has to justify its place on the plan.
We’ve also got our own planning tools that allow you to be nimble and go across that. And I think deeper data insight into audiences is a real benefit that we’ve seen through CTV. In terms of targeting, TV is still age, gender and social class. CTV obviously offers a lot deeper targeting. So there are ways in which we can go beyond traditional TV buying, and offer clients what has been the best of all the TV content they love, but with all that digital targeting that for years they were saying they needed in TV.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
Again, an easy answer could be incremental reach. But I think there are two ways of looking at this. Firstly there’s the measurement perspective. So whatever the campaign objective is, whatever that comes back to as a metric, that’s the one that matters most to us. So it could be completed view or view through rate, but it might be something further down the purchase journey, such as brand recall, or an outcome-led approach, or a metric like ROAS. So it’s really about what the brief is asking and challenging us to do.
But the flip side of that is, the metrics that matter are in the inventory supply. So when we’re looking at CTV with that focus on high production quality and editorial governance, I also think that should be borne through metrics used to measure the inventory you get. So 100 percent sound-on, 100 percent in-view, app-based, player-based, not below the fold, not hidden in text. So all the things that really help you navigate and lower the risk around ad fraud are the metrics that equally matter, even though they’re not measurement metrics.
What could publishers, broadcasters and pay TV companies do to compete more effectively with the tech giants?
I think this could easily come back to a conversation around cash flow and who’s got the deepest pockets. But really I think people just want content that they love to watch, and that doesn’t always have to be glossy, expensive content. And I think you’ve got really good examples like Love Island, which has drawn incredible audiences for ITV, and The Traitors more recently on the BBC, where you just get something right and people will watch. It doesn’t have to be those multi-million-pound per-episode dramas. They’re great, of course, but it doesn’t have to be expensive content. It can just be great content that pulls you in.
I think all the different players in that space have done well to understand where they add value, because ultimately as a customer, you are paying for content one way or the other, whether it’s a license fee or subscriptions, you kind of vote with your wallet. So you’ve got a lot of the broadcasters who have been very focused on live sport; there’s the World Cup coming up this year that’s going to drive incredibly big simultaneous audiences, and that’s going to be very hard to replicate anywhere else.
Then you’ve got the likes of Netflix, who have tapped into a real cultural shift over the last few decades, which is people’s desire for choice and the immediacy of it, and that ability to binge on multiple box sets when you want, how you want. They’ve done fantastically there. They’re also quite adept at driving programming around the sides of sport; the Drive to Survive example is one that everyone will cite, in actually driving interest in the sport itself, without actually buying the rights to Formula One. They’ve done that recently with the WWE rights, and then producing docu-series around that to drive an audience. So it’s quite a smart approach, and they’ve done that well.
But I think ultimately it comes down to the ability to find really good content that people want to watch, which is tricky, because when you think of some of those big tech companies in the CTV space and the depth of their pockets, compared to the programming budgets that some of the broadcasters will have, it does require some smart thinking from schedulers.
Which person in the industry inspires you the most today?
This is going to be really cheesy, so apologies. I don’t think it’s one single person, I think it’s really just a combination of people that I’ve worked with past or present – not just agency side, it could be clients, it could be sales side as well. I think it’s just that ability to pick different bits from people that you admire. Some are fantastic leaders, others are unbelievably great operators that command great respect in the market. There’s a long and distinguished list, but I don’t think there’s any one person who inspires me more than a lot of other people I work with.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
I’m at risk of showing my age here – having done over 20 years in media, there’s quite a lot of campaigns, and a lot that I’m immensely proud of. If I was to pick one of the more recent ones, I think it would be the work we’ve done with Vinted here in the UK. It’s been just under five years that we’ve been working with them, and in that time, I think we’ve taken them from a brand that was known in certain circles and was well respected, to becoming one of the biggest brands in that second-hand fashion space. They’re almost synonymous now with that pre-loved, pre-used clothing piece.
The work we’ve done there has been fantastic, and we’ve been really fortunate that the UK is now one of their biggest markets globally. It’s brilliant to be a part of something that you can see take off in that short space of time, and people have really seen the value in the product. Also the product itself is really strong, as there’s a really clear way for people to monetise something they may have just potentially thrown out. But also the whole sustainability piece is really impressive, because so much clothing ends up in landfill, that finding a way of trying to use it again and avoid that is really incredible.
But beyond that, it’s not just the work we’ve done and how well Vinted have done in the UK; it’s actually the relationship we’ve got with the client as well. They’re really open and honest and they challenge us, but they allow us to challenge them in return. And it’s just a really solid collaborative relationship, and those clients are not rare in the industry, but they are fantastic when you get them, and you feel that you’re working in lockstep. So I’m really proud of the stuff we’ve done with Vinted.
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