In 2020, Content Diversification Will be Brands’ Top Challenge and Opportunity

Lack of order and predictability in how content is consumed is reaching new scale; budgets are shifting to reflect it 

Sean McCaffrey, President and CEO, GSTV  | Abridged version on Campaign

As CEO of a national media network, I spend the majority of my time meeting with global brands across nearly every consumer category, to better understand how they’re specifically solving marketing problems. The buzzwords may change, but core challenges often remain the same. And all involve driving business and brand growth with marketing expected to deliver as a key growth driver.  What they share paints a picture of the problems they’re facing now, and the headwinds they’re planning for in 2020.

The through-line in 2019 is that the forces impacting their marketing are guided by the invisible hand of content diversification - both the cause of and solution to these problems. As consumers spread out in pursuit of their interests, the smartest people in our industry devise ways to turn that differentiation into usable data that can help brands get closer to them. The data-driven debate has raged for the past decade on targeting vs scale, reach vs personalization, and brand vs growth marketing. 

In 2020, consumers ready to scroll and skip at scale, will crash headlong into other trends that create new challenges and opportunities. Below are a collection of topics and trends from my conversations with brands, each of which is grappling with a shift in the content landscape, with notes on their approach to adapting. 

TV TUNE OUT & CONTENT CONSUMPTION SHIFTS

A November report from eMarketer suggests that linear budgets will drop below 30% of total spend next year, for the first time ever. The question for brands whose dollars are part of that $2.4b dollar spending gap, is: how will they spend it, if not on TV?

Behind this massive shift is the continued decline in broadcast viewership, which is perhaps the biggest driver of change impacting marketing today. While TV was at the center of the Big Bang that led to the the narrative-driven advertising universe we all emerged from, today it more closely resembles a star that’s about to implode.

Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, NBC’s Peacock, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and many others are filling the void. Baby Yoda aside, the wars being waged by all of these companies as they pursue advertiser dollars are anything but cute. And the rise of more services, subscriptions and consumer control is a boon for content bingers, but yet again a challenge for marketers to balance reach, targeting and strategy in a media plan needing to solve serious marketing challenges.

Brands have to navigate them all, which means their budgets need to be built for agility. The days of set-it-and-forget-it are long gone; brands need to know where every dollar was spent and what it did for the brand, no questions asked.

Take Hershey’s for example. Six years ago, they were convinced linear TV was the way to go, representing 97% of their budget. This year, linear is under 50%, underscoring that diversifying their media investment is key for growing their brands and reaching new customers.

Of course, TV isn’t going down without a fight. Earlier this year, Nielsen announced it will be counting “out of home” viewing – watching via mobile, in hotels, restaurants and at other people’s houses – to give a clearer picture of true audience size. As the trend away from TV isn’t slowing, this likely won’t solve the problem, but it will soften the blow.

EXTERNAL PRESSURES: SUMMER OLYMPICS & PRESIDENTIAL RACE 

Layering onto the shifts in consumer content consumption, and fight for attention in 2020, are external pressures like the summer Olympics and the presidential race. They’ll live on TV (broadcast, cable and satellite alike), digital (in the form of media coverage and video) and social (breaking news and video). They will occupy mindshare, but also dominate the year in terms of available ad inventory, driving up prices and demand (per eMarketer, not enough to offset total losses for the year), again distorting the environment for brand and consumer connection.

The unprepared will be left to search for advertising platforms that can help them mitigate the lack of air time and walled garden real estate. A year ago, it would have been a safe bet that dollars not spent on linear would shift to digital, but brand safety, fraud and viewability are still challenges in digital media, and there seem to be enough new places for brands to go that digital is a bit stagnant. 

For brands I’m speaking with, OTT is a pricey, confusing and still untested alternative, considered a “broadcast inventory extension” for obvious reasons, but showing promising signs of being able to validate itself from an ROI perspective. Influencers, podcasts, and OOH are all surging too, yet none of these alone are enough to give marketers the scale they need, according to the biggest brands in the country.

The takeaway for any brand trying to reach consumers: rather than fight for space among crowded inventory, refresh your media mix with new platforms that give scale and an engaged audience where you’re out of that fray. 

WHAT’S COOL AGAIN: OOH & AUDIO

Podcasting fits perfectly into content diversification as it’s a key format consumers have turned to as they turn away from TV. Per IAB, marketers will have spent $479 million on podcasts by the end of 2019, a 53 percent jump from 2017. Brands believe that, in the moment of the aural environment, messages resonate when aligned with the right content. 

Further, we’ve come out the other side of mobile growth to realize data and personalization and targeting still can’t always earn you attention in a sea of scrolling (300 feet or more per day now), ad blocking and so on. So the world’s oldest and largest creative canvas – OOH – is once again the shiniest new object to meet consumers on their time and dime, and bring them information, entertainment, utility and value.

To that end, OOH revenue grew 7% in Q3 to nearly $6.4 billion. This figure is a reminder of how big TV is – that amount is roughly how much linear will lose in 2020. So the OOH space continues to heat up as the largest brands, from McDonald’s, Geico, Apple, State Farm, Chevrolet, Amazon, Facebook, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, and HBO accelerate spend and use. 

Both OOH and Podcasting are seeing technological advancements that will keep them hot in 2020, namely programmatic capabilities that will extend their run as the cool kids on the block, and lead to the emergence of indirect paths to utilization.

Worth noting here: it wasn’t long ago that both audio and OOH were the least interesting media buys available. So while TV may be on the decline, it could be the hottest new platform in just a couple of years. Marketers are telling me that they continually interrogate their own assumptions about media partners, channels and choices as new innovation and efficiency does exist beyond the latest ad-tech play. 

SUCCESS STARTS AND ENDS WITH ATTENTION 

I wrote earlier this year that the cost of consumer attention is ROI. We’re asking consumers to apply their minds to our messages at moments where that isn’t possible. It’s the natural effect of content diversification - as we’re given more options for things to look at, we have less attention to give any particular thing. 

Consider your own TV viewing habits. Are you fully engaged all the time? The old adage that we run to the kitchen during the commercial now fights with the notion that we’re on our phones, passively watching as we scroll Amazon. When we’re scrolling, we’re blind to the ads that are passing through our feeds (for the products we bought weeks ago, and returned). 

Consumer behavior is a moving target, and a tricky one to ever nail down. For that reason, attention has once again captured mindshare across the market. Where can I find engaged, captive audiences, and what is being done to maintain that attention? Those attentive moments are the ones that matter for brands. 

The most interesting brands I speak to all reference a similar theme: there is often innovation hiding in plain sight.

CONCLUSION 

While the growing availability of content and decreasing attention spans makes 2020 out to be a chaotic year to navigate, it’s quite the opposite. There is great reward ahead for brand leaders ready to embrace the unknown and realize the strongest accelerant for marketing success is embracing the disruption by finding balance in the art and science.

Dare to be bold by challenging creativity beyond the creative. Build a media strategy that’s agile and welcomes incorporating platforms that can reach attentive consumers and deliver results at scale. Be OK with trying something new, and that might mean something so-called old that’s newly relevant again. The same goes for failing, if doing so means uncovering  insights on consumer trends or discovering messaging that stood out. At GSTV, we’re bullish about the new year because these trends will challenge brands to think about what’s important to them -- audience, engagement, agility, and delivering on growth outcomes. Here’s to a great year.