As streaming giants increase the availability of their inventory and insights, UK broadcasters need to strive for parity with those global suppliers or risk being left off media plans, says Paul McGee, Head of Video Planning at Goodstuff. “We get relatively little insight out of Channel 4, and much deeper stuff from Amazon. So how do we get parity in terms of outputs and insights from those players like Channel 4 and Sky?”
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, McGee discusses the political factors holding back the broadcasters, the rise of in-housing in media buying, and the ad tech solutions that add value for Goodstuff’s new-to-TV clients.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
On the client-side, I think my bugbear is when clients see CTV as quite isolated, and not really understanding how it’s interacting with other parts of their media mix. I’ve seen cases where everything’s being attributed on a last-click basis, and lo and behold, your ROI on your paid search is looking fantastic, but your CTV has apparently not worked.
On the media owner-side (though I will say this has massively improved in the last year or so), it’s when there’s not enough care and attention around supply, inventory and the kind of shows people are watching, and just seeing any CTV impression as equally valid, almost in the way that classic digital and classic programmatic may have seen things. And if we’re not necessarily getting a clean pathway and quality environment, that becomes really important as well.
So those are my two bugbears in CTV; not seeing its general benefit to the plan, but on the other side, not taking in the importance of quality programming and content.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
I’ve been at Goodstuff for about 11 years, so I’ve seen all the guts and glory of the process. I’d say one of the things that’s really accelerated in the last year or two is the in-housing of media buying, and clients bringing certain capabilities within their walls. Getting a buying seat in most DSPs now is not too tricky a process. And if our job is not simply just buying media, because media can be bought by anyone, where are we adding value, where are we being useful?
Some of that could be in trading; are we able to get preferential rates, preferential tech and support from those platforms? And I think that’s where a lot of tech-focused holdcos or smaller independents are really useful. But the other part of it is around strategy, and if you’re an in-house trader who’s come from a performance world and is moving into the video world, you need more help with that.
On the one hand there’s a lot of risk in that, because obviously if you see the agency’s role as transacting media, that model may be in decline. But actually it’s more about where we add value, and I think agencies that can prove that in terms of tech, people and skill, those are the agencies that are going to get the most traction with a lot of those digital-first clients going forward.
Which do you think video advertising is the most effective for – generating awareness and brand-building, or driving short-term sales?
If you were treating video purely as a response channel I think it would lose out to other performance channels, and your relationship to the user on the end of that impression is much more tenuous than it would be on mobile or other devices. The TV is a communal device, and there are lots of platforms like Amazon and The Trade Desk that offer pixel responses, but if that account is doing one thing and the user is maybe using their work phone as well, you’ve got that breakdown of relationship between exposure and event. So when you’re looking at it from a last-click perspective, it’s going to struggle.
One of the ways we try to think about CTV within multi-touch campaigns where performance and display are working together, it can almost be a bit of a centre to a solar system. It drives awareness, it can build that awareness into things like familiarity, trust and those sorts of metrics, which sound quite fluffy but also have a massive impact on your page ranking, your click through rates and those lower-funnel metrics. So it has a really important way of doing that. Our struggle really is demonstrating that link between the two. And because of the nature of the device, there’s always going to be that tension. So you’re reliant on building a set of understandings and learnings about how it does that.
At Goodstuff we launched a new product called Move, which is about proximity to the point of purchase. So let’s say you’re selling a pair of trainers, you have everyone in the country that has feet, and they may want a pair of trainers, but they may not necessarily be in market. You’ve got someone who’s about to buy a pair of trainers right now and is clicking on a paid search link to buy a pair of trainers, and you’ve also got high-propensity audiences, so people who are closer to purchase than anyone else in the market, but maybe are not about to click the button.
And I think that’s where CTV has a real benefit for reaching those near-to-market audiences. CTV by the nature of its addressability and also its connection to culture and context can give you a way of focusing your high-impact brand-building media to those more high-propensity audiences.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
Mostly it’s the TV team, because at the moment we largely view CTV as an extension of general broadcast behaviour. When we think about video, it’s everything within video, from CTV and those digital-focused channels, all the way to linear TV and even cinema. We want to make sure that buyers have complete flexibility around those different channels. And if our consumers are seeing an ad on TV as just TV, whether they’re watching on AVOD, BVOD or linear TV, then we need to think in those consumers’ mindset, so we’re not siloing ourselves off.
What I would always say is that this may work for today, but tomorrow could be a completely different situation. And as we go on that journey, we develop people’s skills, strengths and abilities, and almost create different species of buyers within that TV team.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
I think it’s giving us more opportunities; we’re able to do a lot more international work than we maybe would have done 10 years ago. On the one hand, the rise of global players over local players can be a negative in society, but it means that we’re able to transact on one single buying point across different markets. And I think that’s very attractive for clients who don’t want separate relationships for every single market, they want to be able to have a team to be able to manage across those markets.
And the rise in addressable TV also gives us a lot more opportunity and a lot more variability in how we target and build audiences. So we’re not simply looking at broad audiences, but thinking about content, context, propensity, and thinking about audiences in slightly different ways. Having that greater flexibility and focus on propensity gives us more powerful tools to find audiences and then activate them in high-quality, premium content.
So it makes our job richer, more entertaining, and more effective for our clients. It doesn’t make the job any easier! And I think you’d be hard pressed to find any agency that’s really cracked the nut properly in terms of CTV buying. And when you think about having a strategic approach, it’s as much about what you’re not doing as much as what you are doing; what things you maybe hold back on versus the things you really push into. My ex-colleague Dylan Pritchard over at Bicycle has very much gone down that route of, here’s what we’re not doing and here’s what we are doing. I think we still want to make sure that we give as many options to our clients as we can.
What could agencies do better to help clean up the industry?
I wouldn’t necessarily say that we are in the weeds of proprietary media or the big bad world of programmatic in terms of the worst problems we’ve seen over the last few years. And I think our inquisitiveness on content and environment is a really important part of that too. Our focus is really around transparency solutions, transparency of supply pathways, and finding partners and solutions that optimise towards that.
And I think keeping it simple also plays a part there. Fundamentally we don’t necessarily need to build particularly mad trading approaches. We know what environments we want to buy into, and we build beneficial relationships with our clients and partners in order to transact that as effectively and as efficiently as possible. And I think as long as that’s the core guiding light, and that’s also what the market prioritises and rewards, then that’s what we want to do.
Which ad tech solution has delivered the most impact for your business?
Beatgrid was really cool. We ran it a while back with our client OVO. Cross-platform measurement across quite varied plans is always a challenge, especially where you might be buying across multiple buying seats that plug into loads of different SSPs, and data is not being shared together. And then you have other measurement platforms that have big black holes within them too.
So using Beatgrid was a really beneficial approach to take, because of the nature of its panel and its independence from supply. The client hadn’t spent money on TV and video for a very long time, so there was some nervousness in the business about doing it. But being able to get those quick reads was really beneficial. So that was a great bit of ad tech.
I think more broadly, we work with lots of new-to-CTV brands, so wherever we can get clean, quick and clear insights that can be fed up the funnel really helps give our clients the confidence that what they’re doing is driving an impact. So any tools that can do that in a clear, coherent way have been really beneficial.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
Mostly brand metrics, so prompted awareness, but also things like familiarity. We do a lot of work around drivers analysis to understand the factors that drive people further down the funnel, from pure awareness into purchase, or likelihood to buy. So when we can get those metrics aligned from brand surveys and lift surveys, that really helps us prove the theses that we make in planning.
What could publishers, broadcasters and pay-TV companies do to compete more effectively with the tech giants?
I think it’s partly about doubling down on what they do, so focusing on locality and making that their big play in the market. The local players are being more and more squeezed out by big pan-national suppliers; ITV are being squeezed out by Amazon, Channel Four by Netflix. So I think focusing on understanding what local markets need, but also how they shout out to those global players. I think MFE has a great approach around consolidating supply across local markets in Europe and going into the UK.
But they also need to make their inventory more available to transact, and to have a relative symmetry with those other partners. For instance we get relatively little insight out of Channel 4, and much deeper stuff from Amazon. So how do we get parity in terms of outputs and insights from those players like Channel 4 and Sky?
There seem to be loads of random things that they just don’t do. They don’t get involved with AudienceProject, they don’t get involved with other measurement platforms, they don’t insert pixels and certain kind of tagging as well. And I think all that does is make it easier and easier to remove someone from the plan, because we didn’t get any insights from these guys, but we did get insights from these guys here. So I think they need to create a level of parity with the tech giants, which I’m sure they’d be able to do, because a lot of the tech in the back should make that easy to do. I think maybe it’s more political than technological.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
The European Video Award-winning Dr Squatch campaign that we did with MiQ. They’re a US-based men’s grooming company mostly focused around natural products. A lot of their marketing strategy is about getting iconic celebs to front their campaigns. They had the Sydney Sweeney bathwater campaign, where they took some of her bathwater and turned it into bars of soap. They’ve also done stuff with Paddy Pimblett and Megan Fox. So that “organic” reach is very strong!
We got quite a small brief from them when they wanted to launch in the UK, we’re talking low six figures. They also had a relatively small penetration in the UK in certain Waitrose stores, but that’s now grown out to include Boots and Tesco. But again we had a small budget and we wanted to create a big impression with the audience. So the levers you can pull in terms of planning here, you can say, I’m going to bring down my CPM to maximise my amount of impressions. And the easy thing to do there is buy into lower-quality inventory. Or you can have a very steadfast approach and say, I’ll take the high CPM because I want high-quality inventory. But what I can do is really focus my activity and my addressability.
So our approach was really geo-focused. We basically found areas with drive times to the retail locations, but also layered on propensity models using retail data, as well as other sources around demographics. And that gave us a really pared down postcode list to address the media against. We ran on Prime Video and a range of other AVOD suppliers, and focused on the younger male audience.
We ran a few bursts of campaigns, and all in all we see big upticks in the regions where we’re running the activity. And because you’re using a geo model, you can compare that against areas where you haven’t run that media. So in London we saw 100 percent uplift versus the national average. We ran a few campaigns, building iteratively and increasing the footprint and the budgets, but keeping the same focus on high-profile premium content, and the young male audience. I’m not saying it got the brand bought by Unilever for $1 billion, but it helped on that trajectory as well!
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