By John Battelle
Remember the “year of mobile”? That was the five-year period from roughly 2007 to 2012, when industry pundits annually declared that everything was about to change because of the smart phone. Mobile eventually did come to dominate the marketing landscape, but the shift took far longer than anyone expected.
I’m starting to think we’re in a similar cycle with streaming – only the transition from cable to digital television has taken far longer, and has been far, far messier. I recall editing the February, 1994 cover story for Wired, in which we asked – thirty years ago! – if advertising as we knew it was finally dead. We opened that piece with a futuristic scenario in which advertising had changed completely:
Super Bowl XLVII, January 2015, Buffalo, New York: Half a dozen Bills fans huddle around a 40-inch video monitor in Jack Public’s living room, hoping the men in blue can snap a losing streak spanning the last thirteen Super Bowls. The group has been tense and largely silent through a scoreless first quarter, but when quarterback Jim Kelly, Jr. hits a deep receiver for a 45-yard touchdown pass, Jack’s wife, Jane, sends the popcorn flying and the Albertsons nearly choke on their fat-free Fudgsicles.
As the kicker prepares for the extra point, hundreds of marketing executives around the country crack their knuckles over their keyboards. The programmer cablecasting the game will almost certainly take an ad break. For advertisers, the real contest is about to begin.
The fantasy continues:
…the announcers say they’ll be right back, and Jack’s screen turns royal blue. A message comes on from a car company: Watch this commercial and we’ll bring a 101-XZ coupe to your house and let you test drive it for a day. “Anybody wanna test drive a 101?” Jack asks. No answer. The message disappears and is replaced with: Watch this commercial and get a case of Wuenderbeer for half price. “I’ll take that,” Jack says, punching a couple of keys on the remote control.
At Wuenderbeer headquarters in Milwaukee, a computer receives Jack’s signal and, referencing a satellite map of his town, instantly creates an animated commercial in which two dragons from another galaxy battle in the streets of Jack’s neighborhood over a giant bottle of Wuenderbeer. Just as the evil dragon is about to smash Jack’s house, the good one drives a neighbor’s chimney through the heart of his nemesis, saving Jack’s home and winning the beer. As Jack’s converter box spits out a bar-coded coupon for a bargain case of suds, the dragon turns to the camera and offers a toast: “Here you go, Mr. and Mrs. Public, this Wuenderbeer’s for you.”
Man, that scenario has it all – programmatic auctions, dynamically created content, world-class generative AI, T-commerce, sophisticated personalization, QR codes!– hey, wait, we have all that technology! Why hasn’t our future arrived?
I blame the KPI culture that’s inundated the marketing world ever since the arrival of the click-through rate (CTR) back in the late 1990s. Once the industry got hold of metrics that could be gamed to make it look like our spend was justified, we’ve never looked back. We’re addicted to performance metrics. Case in point: “Performance Marketing Is Coming For Everyone,” from Mike Shields’ often-excellent “Next In Media” newsletter. In it, Shields quotes a marketing executive proclaiming that, in essence, branding is dead when it comes to television:
“If we just take cues from the last five years, TV Is going to move toward performance,” said Jake Richardson, headed of connected TV, Moloco. “Every single channel has followed the same path of digitalization: first, automate execution via programmatic, and then optimize for performance. TV will be no different. … growth and user acquisition teams are going to be in the driver’s seat.”
Other smart folks pile on from there: “If you cannot show performance, you are dead,” declares Brian Morrissey. Lord help us all if that happens. I can just see it – our streaming television experience taken over by Frankensteinian versions of Instagram and TikTok feeds, all leveraging user data and algorithms to optimize users into engaging with advertising that increasingly vanishes into simulacrums of the very content we’ve supposedly tuned in to consume. Blech. (Come to think of it, that feels a lot like Netflix lately…)
People of the marketing world, as we consider the future of television advertising, I ask you to remember the context in which we operate. We don’t watch television to engage in the real world. We watch it to leave the world behind. We want to be immersed in stories, in narrative. What we absolutely don’t want is to have our last sacred media space turned into 65-inch smart phones.
Sure, television advertising is on a relentless march toward the nirvana of personalization, targeting, customization, and OK, I guess you could call it performance, if by “performance” you mean “making sure the right person sees the right ad.” But all those smart folks currently selling you “performance” on social and the open web have made their nut driving conversion – and conversion is not the future of television. Yes, there’ll always be QVC, and I’ll admit it’d be fun to buy things right off your television. But if I’m going to watch advertising intermingled with my Mrs. Maisel, that advertising better understand my frame of mind.
No one watching good television wants to see a 15- or 30-second ad that fails to tell a story. Nor do they want to be optimized into taking an action that leads to a conversion. What they will tolerate are advertisements that introduce new products or services in a manner consistent with the context of their media experience. That, folks, is called awareness and consideration, and it’s way up funnel from conversion. This is brand building, and despite all the noise in today’s media market, brand building can’t be turned into math. Nor, I’d wager, should it be.
