Faced with myriad challenges to long-established advertising models, a continually changing media landscape and a slowly recovering economy, the television industry is actively seeking new advertising strategies.
An impressive line-up of veteran broadcast, advertising and agency execs took on “Television Advertising: Creative Differences and Perspectives” in a Tuesday Super Session moderated by TVB President Steve Lanzano.
One adaptive approach some stations are delving into is hyperlocal news; Seattle-based Fisher Communications got serious about hyperlocal several months ago.
“We found we were discarding maybe 80 percent of our stations’ news content because it was just too local,” said panelist Colleen Brown, Fisher’s president and CEO. “So we sought out ways to [repurpose] the content and now we support about 150 neighborhoods. We needed to learn how to make it scalable and monetize it.”
Brown said they added 1,500 advertisers, based on six-to -12-month subscriptions.
“We’re only six months into it and we’re profitable. We’ve found hyperlocal is a very dynamic enterprise and it extends our brand.”
Fellow panelist Dave Lougee said “we’re at a tipping point right now between mobile and video.” Lougee, president of Gannett Broadcasting and TVB’s vice chair, noted that at a recent session, many in the audience were constantly checking their smart phones.
“What they were doing was refreshing their [phone app] for the latest on the Masters” golf tournament.
Lougee said consumers will intuitively seek live video on their tiny devices, and broadcasters have to quickly take note. “It’s all about to explode as mobile video takes off.”
Panelist Lee Doyle, CEO of North America for Mediaedge:cia, said the buzz today is all about multiplatforms “because we all have to be where the consumers are [going]. I think maybe a ... challenging question is how much will consumers tolerate from what is being pushed at them?”
Doyle cited AT&T’s mobile viewer-vote participation on “American Idol” as a prime example of a very consumer-tolerable example of brand management.
Auto advertising has been a mainstay of television for decades, but that’s changing, too, said Steve Sturm, former group vice president for Toyota North America.
“The name of the game now is deploying a ‘purchase funnel’ approach,” he said, a theoretical model used by marketers to describe the flow of activity from initial interest to purchase. “Carmakers are under tremendous pressure these days — and there’s no method to our madness because of the pressure to sell cars,” Sturm said.
That pressure-cooker climate also is felt by ad agencies, which are tasked with pushing new vehicles off the lots.
Matt Seller, global CEO for Universal McCann, said both his clients (Chrysler and BMW) are now being as creative and open-minded as possible in their marketing approaches. “I’m quite bullish on [Chrysler] right now and their way of thinking. And BMW has always been good at knowing what they want and who they are,” he said.