Heavy LinkedIn users may have noticed agency staff getting trained up and ultimately advocating for the platform’s video capabilities. Matt Towle, Head of Broadcast at Anything is Possible, says the TV world needs its own training offerings to compete with the platforms, where broadcasters and sales houses help buyers navigate the CTV ecosystem.
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Towle also discusses how CTV is reducing barriers for smaller advertisers, the need for agencies to expand from buying houses to strategic consultants in the age of AI, and the importance of curiosity in agency teams.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
Something I’ve seen a lot at the moment – and perhaps I’m spending too much time on LinkedIn – is a lack of agreement in the market at the moment about what the best role is for many video tactics, particularly CTV and even other channels like YouTube. I think debate is a good thing, but too often I’m seeing that brand versus performance narrative basically going around in circles, which makes me think there are a lot of agencies that are probably taking one approach or the other, and then perhaps trying to shoehorn in tactics or even entire channels into one or the other.
I see it a lot from the buy-side, and also to a certain extent from the supply-side as well. It’s usually that older, traditional AV crowd going up against performance-first agencies. So my bugbear is more of a worry about how that narrow-minded approach can impact future client confidence in the channels, if they’re using it in the wrong way or if it doesn’t fit the asset’s purpose on a plan.
I’ve seen a few examples of that over the past couple of years, especially after onboarding a new client. It will usually be something along the lines of, ‘We tested a highly targeted AdSmart or CTV campaign with a lot of intent-based data overlaid on top of it, but we didn’t see enough attributed sales come through, so we consider it a failure, and we don’t particularly want to look at that as an option again.’ But then when we go a little bit deeper and get under the skin of the campaign that they activated, sometimes it’s actually that they had a pure brand asset running. There’s no call to action, there’s nothing that actually makes that suitable for a response environment. Yet they’re expecting that they’re going to see an immediate attributed sale, which makes it difficult.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
I’ve only been in the industry for a little over ten years, so the level of context I had when I was a media assistant starting out is probably quite limited! But I think the democratisation of access to rich data and tools, and this gradual reduction we’re seeing in trading power, means independent agencies of all sizes are increasingly able to compete with those much bigger holdcos.
Alongside that, what I’ve been seeing is that need to move from being a buying powerhouse, and more towards being a strategic consultant for our partner clients. Smart, competitive buying should always be a core pillar in an agency. But I think with the pace of change that we’ve been seeing in our industry, and the increasing pressure that we see on marketing budgets, particularly over the last 12 months, there’s much more need for what I’ll call ‘soft services.’
For example, we’re seeing a lot of situations now where educating our clients is taking a much larger proportion of the time we’re actually spending together, whether it’s face to face, on calls or over email. Particularly as the market gets increasingly more fragmented and complex, it’s unlocking a lot more confidence in our direct relationship with them, but also in making their conversations with CEOs hold up a lot better. And that can only be a good thing for longer-term growth, particularly from a brand-building perspective, so trying to protect brand budgets which are usually the first to come under scrutiny.
I think it’s also really important to be thinking about the next ten years, or even less. With AI developing at such a staggering pace, if agencies are seen more as a buying mechanic or a buying partner, rather than a strategic partner, there’s a lot of exposure to in-housing or just moving parts of that investment back in-house. So it’s going to be tricky to navigate over the next few years.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
All CTV sits within the media team; at our agency we split it across both the broadcast and performance teams. It all depends on the strategic goal of the campaign and the asset that we’re going to be working with. We don’t see the need to try to gatekeep that channel from any one team. There’s capability to be able to activate it regardless of where you sit within the agency, as long as you are dealing with buying. But what we focus on is having a strategist at the top who’s navigating the needs of the client’s campaign, and then almost consulting with both buying teams.
Sometimes there’s a clear need for it to be performance or brand, and it will go into the right team for that tactic. Or there might be some debate around it, and we might actually see a bit of a soft pitch situation, where they might allocate a budget out to both teams, and we’ll actually work together on an account. They’ll actively debate the best use of the tactic for that partner, under the lens of what the asset is and what the strategic need of the campaign is.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
There are two ways it’s changed. We’ve got established TV brands who have been investing primarily in linear, more often with older audiences, that are getting to the point where they’re reaching either diminishing returns of their reach, or reaching diminishing returns of some longer-term response and effectiveness metrics that we might see as that channel matures. What’s been great, particularly for older audience buys, is the pace at which adoption is happening in the CTV marketplace from a viewer perspective. Some of the testing that we’ve done over the past couple of years has either held up to the outcomes that we see on linear TV investment, both from brand or response, or it’s actually delivering even more effective results and providing incremental gains across the entire funnel.
But what I particularly like about the growth of CTV is the reduction of barriers for smaller brands. It means we can take a slightly different tack from purely trying to find incremental reach with advertisers who are spending over £1 million. It’s the smaller brands who might have £30,000, where investing in something like linear TV presents so many barriers, whether it’s trying to get a Clearcast-approved asset, finding an asset that’s suitable for the linear environment, or even just having enough investment to actually go and buy from someone like an ITV, Sky or Channel 4.
What we’re finding particularly with SVOD and CTV is that it’s a lot more palatable in terms of upfront investment. So we can sometimes start them on more of a performance-based focus to prove the channel, and then build them up to investing more on that channel over time. So it’s made it a lot easier from a test-and-learn approach to not have to throw hundreds of thousands of pounds into it without it being proven. So I’ve really enjoyed seeing that come through over the past couple of years.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
It depends on the strategic role within the campaign. Obviously for lower-funnel performance messaging, we’re primarily looking at the number of site sessions that are directly attributable to an impression, but then also sales conversion on-site, which we’re obviously using for short-term optimisation.
But then with more brand-led tactics, it’s worthwhile having that session data as well, but our primary focus is the longer-term impact on metrics like share of search trends, brand tracking, or from a sales perspective, longer-term seasonal uplifts that we can tie back to that investment.
What could publishers, broadcasters and pay TV companies do to compete more effectively with the tech giants?
I’m going to answer this question more through the lens of social video as being one of the tech giants. I think as businesses, they do a fantastic job of having training offerings and consultancy services for agencies, and at a one-to-one level within those agencies as well. So a really good example is all of the programs that LinkedIn runs, which not only train internal agency people up, but over time are actually turning them into advocates on the LinkedIn profile. They’ll have a series of people who work in agencies actively posting about how to get the best out of LinkedIn video specifically.
I’ve not seen anyone from a publisher, broadcaster or pay-TV company have any kind of service like that. I think the best we have at the moment is Thinkbox TV Masters. But that’s not even necessarily tied back to any sales house, and I think it’s quite outdated for the modern market. So I think as an industry, we can do a much better job of training our agencies and offering that out to clients as well, to help them navigate the ecosystem.
Which person in the industry inspires you the most today?
That’s a very hard one to answer. I had a name that came to mind from when I first started in media back in New Zealand: Simon Bird, the Head of Strategy at PHD. One thing he drummed into everyone, and me as well, was the need for curiosity above everything else. It’s something that gets baked into a core behaviour of most agencies, to the point that it’s a cliché now. But I think it is so important, and it’s even more important now than it was ten years ago, because the pace of change is so quick. And if people aren’t curious and they’re not eager to learn more and get into the bones of these new developments and try new things, then you’re just going to get left behind, whether that’s at an agency level or a personal level within an agency.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
I’m very proud of our work with a non-profit company called Boundless, who are a new-to-TV brand. We started them off as a £15,000-per-month, linear TV-only brand, and it’s been a real pleasure going on that journey with them, proving the effectiveness of the investment up to the point where we’re investing almost ten times that now, on both linear and now CTV tactics as well. And at our agency, we primarily like to see ourselves as a growth partner, so to see that come to life on a specific campaign that you work on has been great.
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