Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, revealed in a recent piece a powerful media metaphor that may become an important factor in the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Yes, the fate of either candidate in their quest for the presidency may depend on the now-fading memories of a TV host named Ed Sullivan. He’s universally remembered, of course, for creating the enduring cultural tsunami of The Beatles performing live on his show for three straight weeks in the winter of 1964. 

As Noonan observed, Trump “grew up, as did I, watching The Ed Sullivan Show. I’m sure it was on every Sunday night at 8 at the Trump house in Queens. On that show, you saw every week the great Borscht Belt comics of 1950-70. Their timing — ‘Take my wife — please!’ — is ingrained in him. What he does now is shtick, because he likes to entertain and is a performer.”

It’s hard to believe, but The Ed Sullivan Show on the CBS television network actually signed off in 1971 — over a half-century ago. By then, the show’s format and stars seemed like relics from the earlier days of vaudeville and burlesque.

The parade of comedians such as Henny Youngman, Myron Cohen, Alan King and Totie Fields made our parents and grandparents howl uncontrollably as we watched with them in our living rooms; it was true appointment TV for the entire family. By the time of Ed Sullivan’s poignant wave of the hand as the final episode’s credits rolled, however, a new breed of comics such as George Carlin and Richard Pryor clearly were emerging as favorites for a younger and hipper generation.

Sullivan also notably had as a show feature a recognition of celebrity guests in the audience, asking them to stand up so they could be recognized with a hearty round of applause. One can easily imagine a portly man in a blue suit and long red tie smiling and putting his thumbs up after the camera panned over after Ed Sullivan shouted his name. “Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s welcome noted New York businessman and man about town Donald Trump!”

In its time, The Ed Sullivan Show received consistent blockbuster ratings that far exceeded competing series hosted by the likes of Walt Disney and Steve Allen. It prospered for an incredible 23 seasons. But today, the last remaining vestige of Ed Sullivan is the nightly announcement that Stephen Colbert’s late-night show is being broadcast from a theater that CBS had named in Sullivan’s honor.

In contrast, the Harris campaign seems to have tapped into another zeitgeist entirely. Music outlets, with radio and streaming platforms such as Spotify and Pandora, are more important today in promoting stars who many younger and more diverse voters follow with the same sense of devotion that their elders had for those who appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. As Megan Thee Stallion and Charli XCX begin to show up at Harris campaign rallies and on her social media posts, accompanied by a Beyoncé soundtrack, the stark difference between the personas of the two candidates and their followers now is in full view.

While Trump and Harris compete politically, the battle between intense media experiences then and now seems likely to play an unanticipated role in how many will turn out to vote on Election Day, and who they ultimately select as their candidate of choice. Alas, the ghost of Ed Sullivan may well be a looming presence when people cast their ballots for the 47th president of the United States. 

I love freedom of the press. I applaud speaking truth to power. Fueled by these commitments, I am eager to discover solutions for the rightly venerated newspaper industry.

Since the dawn of the digital age, newspapers have been going the way of the dinosaurs. But the march towards extinction can be slowed, if not halted, with newspaper-television common ownership in the same market that augments reporting resources and journalistic talent to advance the public’s right to know.

 A good example is The Washington Post after it swapped WTOP Washington for a Detroit station in 1978, based on ownership limitations. 

Numbers do not lie.

The Post lost a stunning 500,000 subscribers from 2020 to 2023. It lost $77 million last year and is struggling to keep its head above water despite owner Jeff Bezos’ wealth. Advertising dollars have migrated to online platforms featuring more targeted and profitable advertising options.

The Washington Post is not an outlier. Newspaper advertising revenue plunged from 2002 to 2020 a staggering 52%, from $46.2 billion to $22.1 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Service Annual Survey, as newspaper readers fled to digital sources for news. In 2023, internet advertising revenues rocketed to $225 billion, a 7.3% annual increase, per the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Social media alone accounted for $64.9 billion in ad revenue, an annual jump of 8.7%.

Further, social media and other digital platforms enjoy an enormous artificial advantage over  newspapers or broadcasters. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the former is shielded from liability for defamatory content posted by users. The latter is not. A newspaper or television station or network is legally exposed to actionable defamation for republishing statements made by third parties. Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million for publishing false statements that its electronic voting machines counted votes for former President Donald Trump as votes for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Additionally, platforms like Google and AI profit by raiding content created by newspapers, broadcasters, or other content creators to make money. Current copyright protection for the creators is dubious or uncertain. The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The complaint alleges the companies without permission used Times articles to train their AI models to generate outputs directly derived from copyrighted material. Congress could easily amend the Copyright Act to expressly extend protection against raiding copyrighted material of newspapers or broadcasters by Google, Microsoft or others, but the latter deter legislators with PAC money. 

Relevant content is created by local TV and surviving newspapers, only for our content to be stolen and used to make more money than TV and newspaper outlets.

Several other countries have recognized the unfairness and distortion of the marketplace that ensues by withholding copyright protection from content creators. The European Union passed the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, requiring large online platforms to pay new publishers for using snippets of their content. The compensation is typically negotiated between platforms and publishers to fix a fair price.

Australia was a pioneer with the News Media Bargaining Code in 2021. It mandates negotiations between digital platforms and news media companies to pay for news content. If an impasse is reached, an arbitration process fixes the compensation. Canada’s Online News Act of 2023 is similar. It also requires negotiations between platforms and content creators to fairly compensate the latter for boosting the profits of the former. The Act aims to prevent the extinction of Canadian journalism.

At the dawn of broadcasting, the public benefits of common ownership of newspapers and stations were acknowledged by the Federal Communications Commission. It encouraged newspapers to invest in radio and television to boost these technologies and expand media availability. Newspapers were endowed with the financial resources and journalistic talent needed to operate radio and television stations, which accelerated the latter’s growth and audience reach. 

The Gannett newspaper chain was a prime example. The Washington Post Co. acquired WTOP in 1950. Its TV news operation flourished alongside its newspaper. 

In the digital age, it is fatuous to worry that common television and newspaper ownership in the same market compromises viewpoint or news diversity. The internet has ushered in virtual limitless competitive platforms. Moreover, as renowned First Amendment scholar Alexander Meiklejohn taught, “what is essential is not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.” 

Newspapers and broadcasters vet their content for quality. Internet platforms often do not, which is why it overflows with blather and imbecilities.

I am not suggesting that newspapers or broadcasters should be shielded from creative destruction ushered in by digital innovations and free market forces. But competition from the latter strengthened by unfair legal advantages has made encouragement of common ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations instrumental to preventing newspapers from becoming museum pieces like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I am dedicated to moving heaven and earth to see that such a free press tragedy does not happen.

This is the man who changed my life.

I first met Jamie Kellner on my second day at Fox — in May of 1987. I’d come from CBS. It was a really stiff environment and I was not a good fit. It wasn’t going well.

Also Read: TV Business Pioneer Jamie Kellner, Creator of the Fox and WB Networks, Dead at 77

I started two days before the big annual programming presentation (the upfront) to advertisers showing what programs they could buy ad time in for the coming year. Our presentation was at the Boathouse in Central Park. On brand for Fox … different, cool, unique. We are kind of outdoors, and it’s pouring rain. Pouring. As I am milling about, waiting for clients to show up I see this guy in a suit bending down and wiping the floor with napkins. He pops up and Dave Cassaro says, “Jed, meet Jamie Kellner.” The network president is wiping the floor. Clearly this isn't CBS. I knew right away that Fox was a network I could thrive in.

Jamie built a free-wheeling environment. Contribute more where you can. So I did. I asked if I could chase the NFL’s upcoming TV contract. “Sure,” he said, “just let me know how it’s going.” Just like that. Go ahead. I wrote a script for the Fox comedy Get a Life. They offered me a job in programming! That doesn’t happen at CBS! Or NBC! Or ABC! (I didn’t do it.) That’s the company Jamie built.

He left Fox. I saw a Wall Street Journal story that Warner Bros. was starting a network run by … Jamie Kellner. He hired Fox veterans in programming and marketing. “Please Jamie … call me.” Two months went by. I walked in after a long day and my wife Patty said: ”Carmella [Jamie’s asst.] called. She asked you to call Jamie.”  

Jamie said: “I’m getting the Fox band back together. Come and build the sales department for us.”   

He had only two rules: “Don’t ever be afraid to tell me the truth, no matter how bad it is,” and, “I will entertain where you need me but I am not staying out all night. I’m too old.”  

Our ad-buying customers loved him. They genuinely rooted for him to succeed. He respected them and their role in our future. He had fun with them, too. We attended a luncheon hosted by the Detroit Ad Club. Jamie was the featured speaker. The host was an attractive woman with a big job in the auto industry. When she introduced Jamie to the crowd she touched on his accomplishments and finished by saying, somewhat flirtatiously, “all that … and he’s quite charming too!” Jamie got to the mic: “Aw, you're easy!” Classic Jamie.  

After I left The WB, I wrote him one or two times a year to touch base. He asked about work, recommended me for a few jobs. He cared. I saw him one last time in Montecito, maybe three years ago, at lunch with my WB buddies Bob Bibb and Lew Goldstein. He was a little slower but he still had that easy laugh.  We talked about our old TV business and the three of us just listened to him.  It was a pleasant time that we wished had gone on longer but he tired out so we drove him home and said goodbye.

Many of us in the industry over the years owe Jamie thanks.  By starting two different networks, he created a slew of jobs and started a ton of careers — not just at the respective networks but studio jobs for showrunners, writers, producers, directors, casting execs … the whole programming drill. And TV stations … so many created during Fox's growth … that needed news divisions and staffing … and also created vast fortunes for those enterprising few who built groups and then sold them. So give Jamie a nod of thanks today.

Jamie left a big imprint on my life. A fun, smart, really good guy. I will miss him. 

As streaming becomes the dominant way people consume TV, a shift toward programmatic buying is accelerating. The increasing availability of biddable inventory, combined with the flexibility that programmatic offers, is prompting some to question the necessity of a TV upfront that demands hefty ad dollar commitments.

It’s reasonable to speculate that a world where a few networks sell upward of 75% of their linear ad inventory for the upcoming year in just a few short weeks may not make long-term sense. However, advertisers will always negotiate commitments to exercise their spending leverage and ensure they aren’t shut out of inventory crucial to the success of their brands. 

That said, the methods used to achieve these goals via commitments are likely to evolve significantly from the TV markets of the recent past. If anything, the upfronts are poised to be revitalized thanks to the growth of programmatic technology.

In the “early days” of this fast-growing medium (i.e., just a few years ago), most marketers bought CTV in the same way as traditional TV — through direct deals. By last year, though, we saw the “early majority” of brands shift from direct I/O toward programmatic and this year we predict that the “late majority” will consolidate their CTV upfronts within a demand-side platform (DSP).

In fact, Advertiser Perceptions found that 69% of advertisers plan to utilize programmatic guaranteed and 56% plan to use private marketplace (PMP) buys in the next 12 months, compared to only 53% planning to use direct I/O. This shows us that TV buying behaviors are changing and mixed, hybrid buying methods are more popular than ever.

Buying TV directly or programmatically is only the first of many decisions buyers must make as they prepare their upfront strategy. Here are my predictions and how advertisers can capitalize on the growing shift toward programmatic.

1. Consolidate TV buys in a softer market: One main reason buyers want to participate in the upfront is to guarantee their share of coveted inventory. The challenge arises when this leads to a proliferation of direct deals that may target the same household too many times. 

One of the biggest advantages of programmatic campaigns with a DSP, specifically via PMPs, is that you can consolidate CTV buys into a unified buying method. This allows you to understand and manage reach and frequency holistically and reduce overlap between CTV and linear, as well as overlap between publishers to maximize reach. This saves advertisers money while making for a better customer experience.

2. Uplevel audience strategies in a converging landscape: As an industry, we like to bucket TV into “linear” and “CTV,” but it’s all just TV to the consumer. The challenge for advertisers is connecting the dots between both channel types to understand things like holistic reach and frequency and who is being exposed to your ads regardless of what viewers are watching or how they are accessing content on their TVs. 

With programmatic, these insights can be leveraged for advanced TV targeting that goes beyond basic demographic audiences. This starts with a foundation of diverse and holistic data, such as combining high-quality ACR data with set-top box data. This allows for a unified approach to TV. It also enables advertisers to reach their audiences more effectively by better understanding viewing behaviors and powering use cases, such as suppressing linear audiences on CTV to drive incremental reach. 

3. Aim for identity-based supply at scale: All of these strategies are only effective if you can actually reach the right audiences. This is why having a foundation of identity within an ad platform — which powers more precise reach — is critical.

While cookie deprecation may seem irrelevant to TV buyers, it sets the stage for other signal deprecations, such as IP addresses. A lack of an “identity spine” also makes connecting measurement between digital channels and inventory difficult. That’s why TV buyers will increasingly value future-proof TV activation backed by robust identity.

Despite initial reservations, the industry is witnessing a significant shift toward programmatic buying, with a hybrid model proving to be particularly effective. As this trend continues, advertisers who embrace these changes will likely find themselves better positioned to reach their desired audiences more effectively and precisely. 

“Lost at sea” is how the National Association of Broadcasters recently characterized the Federal Communications Commission in deliberating a proposal for priority application review and processing for stations that met certain local programming thresholds. The NAB emphasized that local journalism and programming can be best saved in the digital age by abandoning its obsolete, Depression-era broadcast-ownership rules.

That theme also echoed at this week’s NAB Show. Curtis LeGeyt, NAB’s president and CEO, explained that a top priority was the education of policymakers (i.e., the FCC and Congress) on the pronounced marketplace imbalance in the fight for advertising dollars and program content between local broadcasters and titans like Google, X, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, TikTok, etc. None of these giants is handicapped by the FCC’s ownership restrictions. That needs to change.

In his NAB Show main-stage appearance, LeGeyt added that he works daily “to make sure that local stations across the country have the resources that they need to go and deliver on [their] mission. And that means giving our broadcasters a little bit more scale, the ability to compete with big tech.”

I am the sole owner of seven television stations and co-owner of the Baltimore Sun newspaper. I agree with LeGeyt and NAB. Unless the FCC wants the broadcast industry to follow the newspaper industry over the cliff, its rules should recognize that radio and television stations compete for ad and program dollars not just with other local stations, but with gigantic content and distribution platforms with capital resources hundreds of times larger than the largest broadcast operations. As LeGeyt noted, “Washington, D.C., pretends that [broadcasters] only compete against one another for advertising dollars and for audience.” 

As the extensive record developed over the last 20 years in the FCC’s Quadrennial Regulatory Review process shows, the digital disruption of the media marketplace has fundamentally altered competition for audiences and advertisers. Television broadcasters compete with innumerable online and multichannel outlets. But the FCC’s rules impede local stations’ ability to compete successfully by effectively serving viewers. They are like the horse and buggy in the age of motor vehicles.

The broadcast industry’s ability to function in the “public interest, convenience and necessity” (Section 309 of the Communications Act) requires economic viability. Ownership restrictions uniquely saddling local broadcast stations impair “economic viability” and the public interest.

Eliminating the FCC’s anachronistic ownership restrictions will stimulate the development and production of new content more efficiently, technological upgrades, a reduction in redundancy and a streamlining of operations to slash costs and achieve economies of scale. Local broadcasters will then have the means to survive temporary downturns in the economy.

At present, giant ad platforms and tech companies that compete directly with radio and TV broadcasters for audiences dominate the market. They own leading audio and video-streaming services (e.g., Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV Plus, Spotify, YouTube Music) further providing a competitive advantage. They control the dominant consumer technologies (e.g., smartphones, smart speakers, connected-TV devices, etc.) used by hundreds of millions of Americans to access digital content. 

The FCC should write an epitaph to its backward-looking broadcast ownership rules. How can it ignore what all the world can see and daily experience in the marketplace for audiences and programming content in the digital age?

As the sun rises on 2024, a lot of light is shining on the future of sports and its relationship with broadcast television. For fans, things seem to be getting more complicated. Many games are only available through subscription, be it cable, satellite or a streamer. For the first time ever, most of the country had to pay to watch an NFL playoff game in January.

The immediate risk of going behind paywalls might not initially seem huge for some teams. Devoted fans are likely to follow their teams wherever they are — and the beat goes on … for now.

But where do the new fans come from? How does someone become a fan of something they can’t sample for free? What happens to franchises that are still in the process of establishing rabid fan bases?

And as of right now, streaming isn’t working for everyone — and that is going to impact the casual fan. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the NFL playoff game I mentioned earlier — Kansas City Chiefs vs. Miami Dolphins, streaming on Peacock — was the lowest-rated wild-card playoff game dating back to 1991-92.

Built by Broadcast

It’s important to remember the NFL wasn’t always the juggernaut it is now. There was a time it was firmly behind baseball and the product was — for quite a while — considered to be inferior to college football. The legend of the NFL’s growth dates to December 28, 1958, when Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to the NFL championship in a nationally televised game that changed the future of the league. A fan base — and the NFL’s legacy — was truly born that day. Less than a decade later, the Super Bowl existed and the marriage of broadcast TV to professional football was forged.  

Could that have happened behind a paywall? 

There are reasons for optimism for broadcast sports. Our sister Gray Television station in Phoenix is now showing Phoenix Suns and Mercury games over the air across the state. Here in Atlanta, we’re proud to be showing 10 Hawks games across our stations in early 2024 — returning the NBA team to WPCH, where it aired over 30 years ago. 

The reaction on social media when we announced this over the holidays was tremendous: “Awesome News!!” “That’s Outstanding.” “People should always be able to see some of their local teams’ games on TV, period.” “Awesome. About time.” 

It’s not just viewers who are excited. Our sales team is talking to new advertisers who want to be a part of live sports.

Live and Local

We’ve also launched the Peachtree Sports Network with the goal of sharing live sports all across Georgia — from pro basketball and hockey to lacrosse and the Ultimate Frisbee Association, as well as high school sports. The idea is to give fans the games they want but also to grow more fans — people who can watch a game for free, then watch another game, then another …

I grew up in a household of casual sports fans just interested enough to know who won each game in some sports, but certainly not watching nightly. Would I have become the crazy sports fan I am if I hadn’t watched football, baseball, basketball and hockey for free on broadcast television as a kid? Televised games on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings were what did it.

At their best, sports bring the people in this country together. We root for our teams, buy the gear, read about them, watch and listen to shows that talk about them. In many cases, we even pay the taxes that help fund stadiums and arenas. All of that became possible once fans didn’t actually have to attend the games to be part of the action. From listening to reports of the World Series over the telegraph to the evolution into radio and television, mass broadcast created mass fan bases. 

Now, suddenly, we’re at a crossroads. Are sports going to remain something that everyone can be part of, or will they become private games played in publicly financed buildings available only to people willing to swipe their credit card?

The promise of rights fees may be alluring, but teams that go behind paywalls are  putting a ceiling on how big their businesses can be. In the end, no matter what someone is selling, if people don’t know what the product is, they’re just not going to buy it. 

Over the past decade, digital advertising has undergone a remarkable transformation, fundamentally altering how brands engage with their audiences. This change has been primarily driven by the advent of self-service advertising platforms, with giants like Google and Facebook leading the way. 

These platforms have democratized advertising, enabling businesses of all sizes to target audiences with unprecedented accuracy and measure the return on their advertising spend in an incredibly precise way. Now, as we enter 2024, a similar revolution is unfolding in the realm of connected TV (CTV), raising the question: Will this be the year when the TV industry reaches 100,000 advertisers for self-service TV advertising campaigns?

Rise of Self-Service Advertising

Self-service advertising platforms emerged as game-changers for digital marketing, beginning with paid search pioneer GoTo.com in 1998. These platforms offered a level of accessibility and precision that traditional advertising methods couldn't match. Any business — small or large — could set up a campaign in minutes and reach valuable audiences without the hefty budgets typically associated with traditional media buys. Metrics and analytics provided clear insights into ad performance against driving outcomes, ensuring that advertisers could understand and demonstrate the effectiveness and return on investment of their ad spend. This level of control and insight is now extending into the CTV space.

CTV has seen explosive growth over the past several years, with more households choosing streaming services over traditional cable TV. The shift has created a new avenue for advertisers to reach audiences where they are increasingly spending their time.

2024: A Turning Point?

As we progress into 2024, several factors suggest that this could be a pivotal year for self-service CTV advertising. Among them:

Advances in Measurement and Targeting: CTV platforms are rapidly developing their measurement and targeting capabilities. Advertisers can now leverage detailed viewer data to tailor their messages more effectively than traditional TV advertising allows. This precision, akin to what digital advertisers are accustomed to, makes CTV an increasingly attractive option.

Structural Changes in Digital Advertising: The digital ad landscape is undergoing significant shifts, especially this year’s planned phase-out of third-party tracking cookies. With increasing concerns over privacy and data usage, platforms are making changes that impact the effectiveness of traditional digital ads. These changes are pushing advertisers to explore new avenues, with CTV standing out as a promising alternative.

Increased Accessibility: The growth of self-service platforms in the CTV space is lowering the entry barrier for smaller advertisers. Similar to what was witnessed with digital advertising, these platforms allow businesses of all sizes to create and manage CTV campaigns with ease, opening up a market that was previously dominated by large advertisers with substantial budgets.

Diversification of Ad Spend: As more advertisers become aware of the benefits of CTV, including its high engagement and growing audience base, there’s a natural shift of ad spend towards this medium. This diversification is crucial in an era where multichannel advertising is becoming more of a necessity than a choice for brands seeking to maximize their reach and impact.

The Future Is the Past

Back in the early days of paid search in 1998, advertisers had to learn an entirely new way to do business. They had to figure out how to choose relevant keywords, write titles and descriptions for each keyword, upload 1000s of keywords, figure out how to bid, and measure ROI at a keyword-by-keyword level. As simple as this all seems now, it was really difficult back then. But as tools emerged and advertisers inched up the learning curve, a thriving roughly $200 billion-plus marketplace evolved, supported by millions of advertisers. The same thing happened in social.

The democratization of TV advertising is in full swing, driven by new tools and technologies that are analogous to the early days of paid search: self-serve TV buying, ROI measurement, auto-campaign optimization tech, etc. But for most of the 9 million paid search and social advertisers, TV is a new channel. As they embrace the new tools — like self-serve platforms — that democratize TV advertising, we are likely to see a huge surge of search and social advertisers adopting outcome-based TV.

Social media lit up Jo Koy with devastating attacks about his hosting duties at the Golden Globe Awards on January 7. 

But something funny happened on the way to the dustbin of Golden Globes history. Ratings had a dead-cat bounce, rising to 9.4 million viewers — a 50% jump from 2023’s record low of 6.3 million viewers.

Whether more people tuned in from social media’s lambasting of Koy’s unfortunate performance or whether they were drawn to the quality of the nominees (Barbie, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon), and attendees (Taylor Swift, Greta Gerwig, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro), is difficult to determine.

Linear TV is still quite a powerful advertising platform for live sports and tentpole events such as awards shows. The reasons are simple: ratings, cultural relevance via social media, and the ripple effect for days or even months after the fact in the form of user-generated shareable content (tweets, posts, hashtags and memes). 

Each year, Q1 is brings the linear-TV ad trifecta: the Grammy Awards (February 4), Super Bowl LVIII (February 11), and the Oscars (March 10). Perhaps the Golden Globes should be included to make Q1 a “quadfecta?” 

In 2020, the Grammy Awards drew about 19 million viewers, which fell to under 10 million in 2021 and 2022 before rising in 2023 to 12.5 million. And the bored Ben Affleck meme is still memorable a year later. 

The Super Bowl never fails to disappoint as a ratings draw with roughly 100 million viewers each year. While ratings for the other two shows fluctuate wildly, all are amplified by social media commentary.

When our clients ran TV Super Bowl commercials, they experienced increased engagement and a significantly higher response rate on their websites and apps.

Despite the high out-of-pocket cost, the substantial volume of web traffic more than offset the cost, resulting in a lower cost-per-visit for the Super Bowl. The down-funnel impact on new customers and conversions from the Super Bowl was similarly strong and efficient, with the greatest impact realized within the first three days and measurable for approximately 25 days post-spot.

Pregame spots have proven to generate a strong response for numerous brands. Placing ads in tentpole programming elevates awareness among consumers and adds legitimacy and credibility. This is important because there has been a steady decrease in ratings for primetime programming each year, showing a decline of 13.83% from 2022 to 2023.

Clever creative in the right placement drives conversations that happen outside of live broadcasts; what used to be called the “water-cooler” effect — next-day conversations in the workplace — can become immortal online.

The “Breaking Bad” Super Bowl spot for PopCorners last year was widely shared and discussed on social media, even though it aired only once on TV. However many millions the brand spent to run the 60-second spot helped to ensure it reached a substantial audience beyond the telecast and generated a lot of positive buzz for the brand.

Super Bowl LVII in 2023 drew the most viewers in the past five years with 115 million in total, up 16% compared to 2019. Naturally, eyeballs vary depending on the quarter in which an ad appears and whether the game is lopsided.

Like the Grammys, Academy Awards viewership has declined significantly, down 37% in 2023 versus 2019. Yet the Oscars broadcast was one of only seven non-NFL sports programs in the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts of 2023, making it a still-valuable buy. It remains to be seen whether the current beef between New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and scheduled Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel has legs that can stretch to March. 

To maximize impact, brands might consider leveraging strategic partnerships with popular platforms such as YouTube AdBlitz to amplify brand creative and achieve even more mass reach. The coupling generated five times the views of the Super Bowl game itself and provided opportunities to reach incremental consumers, aged 18-49 who didn’t see an ad on TV. The most successful YouTube AdBlitz ads during the 2023 Super Bowl garnered anywhere from 11 million to a staggering 140 million views, showcasing the immense reach of the platform. 

Considering the magnitude of pop-culture influence from a tentpole linear TV event through shareable content and the data derived from sentiments, conversation and interactivity, buying ads on these shows is practically a guarantee for return on ad spend. 

Think of it this way: Despite dismal material and the near-universal panning of his performance, the Taylor Swift death-stare meme generated from one of Koy’s jokes about the singer is worth its viralness in gold. At least now everyone knows who he is.

The fallout from the linear TV apocalypse is starting to materialize.

Consumers are frustrated by a fragmented landscape, TV networks and applications are scrambling to add value and advertisers have been stuck between investing in the waning linear TV space and shifting budgets to streaming.

While television goes through growing pains, how can advertisers win? We must understand the past before we jump into the future.

How We Got Here

In the heyday of linear, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) — the cable operators — appealed to consumers by expanding content choice. To scale, they offered “programming bundles” — service tiers that included multiple cable networks at a relatively reasonable cost. The MVPDs paid the networks low monthly license fees per subscriber. 

Over time, consumer-advocacy groups demanded the offering of networks on an “a la carte” basis. The MVPDs and programmers, citing complex outcomes (e.g., increased consumer pricing), successfully rebuked these demands and the bundle, it seemed, was here to stay. 

And along came streaming. 

Tech companies and consumers latched onto the promise of “what you want when you want it” content. They promised content control. Netflix and free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels launched, while traditional TV networks built strategies to adapt, netting Disney Plus, Max, et al.

Digital technology seemed to win the streaming wars. U.S. cable subscriptions, which topped  out at 97 million households in 2016 (plus about 20 million satellite subscriptions), have precipitously declined and are expected to bottom out at 43 million. To maintain revenue, content providers and MVPDs must increase subscription pricing for those who remain.

These trends have resulted in a doom loop — the more linear players increase prices, the more subscribers leave cable with those departing subs forced to redirect their entertainment dollars to a la carte studio streaming services — whose prices are going to increase to offset the losses in cable distribution and advertising revenue, as well as cover production costs from the streaming wars. 

So the MVPDs and content providers were right: a la carte does not work for consumers!

Predictably, to maintain or boost subscribers while individual app costs increase, the streaming services are bundling. Showtime is now included with Paramount Plus. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus offer package deals. We may even see applications license their exclusive content elsewhere (imagine Ahsoka on Paramount Plus after a six-month run on Disney Plus), reinventing the syndication market.

How We Get Out of Here

While digital technology helped create this doom loop for consumers, linear players and streaming platforms, it creates solutions for advertisers.

Connected TV (CTV) ads, which are delivered on a one-to-one basis via internet protocol and digital technology, provide more comprehensive — and prospectively valuable — audience insights than traditional linear. By marrying first-party data to other interesting, privacy-compliant data sets, advertisers can better define and reach their target audiences. 

For example, let’s say Beyoncé drops a “surprise” album. In the peak days of linear TV, one ad announcing the album could reach millions on, say, a live Seinfeld episode. That’s a lot of prospective buyers. However, via streaming ads on CTV, she could use today’s digital advertising tools to ensure her ad reaches her target audience that has a greater likelihood to purchase.

Measurement, too, offers richer insights into consumer absorption of a campaign, such as incremental lift across all channels in which the user was exposed to the message, or attribution for the album download on a phone, after seeing the ad on CTV.

Importantly, advertisers must consider the CTV ad placements. Quality is not consistent across the thousands of CTV apps and some digital pathways allow for fraud. Advertisers should use the same discretion in selecting CTV partners as they exercised in selecting linear partners, and encourage their technology partners to remove intermediaries who do not add value. 

The right technology platform partners — those with strong data-matching capabilities, quality inventory access and comprehensive advanced reporting — can help bring deduplicated scale across the various CTV platforms and applications. 

While the streaming wars continue, fragmenting consumer eyeballs, marketers can nonetheless use the latest digital advertising tools and win in television’s evolving landscape.

Pick your favorite hyperbolic sports metaphor and the business of sports is probably achieving it. In an era marked by massive sports streaming deals and surging fan viewership, market forecasts predict sports rights will soon top $30 billion. 

But the growing pains are real, especially for frustrated fans who endure whiplash trying to figure out which platform on a given night is streaming the game they want to see. 

There is a growing opportunity to simplify how fans find and view games — for instance, a sports search engine with every streaming option and quick links to the platforms or providers hosting the desired game, or league apps that become first-stop destinations for quickly finding and connecting to events on the right platforms. 

Until recent technical advancements, strategies like these would not have been possible. That’s because the nature of sporting events and business of sports content rights creates unique challenges in logistics, distribution and consumption. 

Ultimately, the goal is to increase the value of subscriptions by making it easier for fans to watch more games and become accustomed to a more consistent viewing experience, regardless of the particular rights holder. 

As leagues and partners acknowledge streaming growing pains, efforts are underway to streamline fan access to games. 

Complexity Breeds Confusion

Streaming has transformed sports viewing, giving fans a diverse range of platforms and access, but this age of abundance is not without pitfalls. A survey by Deloitte highlighted a staggering 50% of fans miss out on games due to platform unavailability. It is no secret the maze of apps and confusion over which company is serving up which game has simply become too complex.

Leagues have multiple teams spanning dozens of regions, often playing simultaneously. Different leagues and sports organizations manage streaming and viewing rights differently and there are sometimes blackout rules in effect for local games. Sports fans also struggle to determine which streaming service hosts a particular game on a specific date and the lack of centralized access to content hinders the ability to watch games live. Add in a requirement to juggle several subscriptions, passwords and apps, and it’s no wonder fans end up missing so much of the content they actually want to see. 

Some connected TV platforms have attempted to unify search but there has been no enduring solution to these challenges. Now, leagues are standing up to the challenge. 

League Apps Can Lead the Way

It makes perfect sense for league apps to be the place fans start every time they want to watch a game. However, integrating users from external streaming services into a league's application is fraught with challenges because such external services each introduce proprietary technical stacks, often using different technologies not designed to integrate with external sources. This puts the burden on engineering teams to manage updates, changes and technical requirements from each of these external platforms.

Leagues usually have to decide between hiring technical experts to handle multiple custom integrations or standardizing the integration process with industry standards like SAML and OAuth. 

A major U.S. sports league recently adopted the integration standardization process. They faced a familiar scenario where content deals made games available through more than a half-dozen partners. Logins needed to be supported through these third-party credentials with viewing taking place in the league’s digital properties or third-party apps. The league recognized that integrating all these diverse platforms into a unified technology stack required an extraordinary amount of technical expertise. It preferred its team of engineers to remain focused on the user experience. 

Sports streaming will only grow more complicated. As fragmentation intensifies, standardized integration processes can be a beacon for leagues and rightsholders eager to enhance viewer engagement and give fans the experience they deserve.  

By aligning with industry standards, sports leagues not only pave the way for revenue growth but also promise fans a seamless, immersive viewing experience.

The proving grounds for the recent evolution of cloud-based broadcast operations has been free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST), a linear-TV streaming format that shares many advantages with internet-connected, NextGen TV broadcasting. One of these advantages includes a one-to-one advertising model that enables the targeting of advertisements to specific users and the collection of extensive, real-time data and analytics on how concurrent users are consuming a channel’s content — all without relying on panel-based reporting from market measurement firms.
Today, many cloud-based workflows originally designed for FAST-style streaming are now being considered for traditional over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting. This is applicable not only to those already invested in ATSC 3.0 but to any legacy OTA distributor.

This convergence of FAST and OTA workflows is an exciting development that gives broadcasters an excellent opportunity to experiment with delivering diverse content over the airwaves. “Convergence” is truly the operative word here: As workflows unite for cloud-based and traditional broadcast methods, content production and distribution will become more streamlined as well. Thanks to the maturity of the cloud within the FAST ecosystem, channels that were once exclusive to digital platforms can now be adapted for OTA broadcasting. And soon, the distinctions between cable offerings, OTA content and over-the-top services will become increasingly blurred. As this transformation unfolds, broadcasters will find it easier to build multiple channels, experiment with new offerings, manage content and ads across FAST and OTA channels, and personalize and localize content.

Benefit 1: Building Multiple Channels Is Significantly Easier

Cloud technology has empowered broadcasters to manage channels and incorporate sophisticated elements more easily and affordably. Thanks to the cloud, there’s little need for dedicated hardware in broadcasters’ setups. And when it comes to managing a channel, all related tasks can now be conducted in a Web browser, where content, graphics and advertisements can be built into a channel instantaneously and contribute to a more comprehensive viewer experience.

As cloud-based workflows for FAST have shown, broadcasters don’t need an entire control room’s worth of software and hardware to incorporate sophisticated elements, including graphics. J-bars, L-bars and other similar elements can be easily constructed in HTML, offering greater flexibility and resulting in a visually appealing presentation that matches the sophistication of cable TV programming. Essentially, broadcasters can construct a website over their channel and can automate various elements such as tickers, clocks, stock quotes, sports scores, weather information or any structured data source they have access to. This capability might have been beyond the reach of many TV stations lacking the necessary hardware or software for overlaying such elements onto their channels. However, by envisioning the channel as a website, the transition to NextGen TV-grade viewership becomes much more feasible. And the best part is that it’s straightforward and cost-effective.

Benefit 2: Experimentation Incurs Fewer Costs and Less Risk

Moving broadcasting operations to the cloud significantly reduces upfront costs, providing broadcasters with the flexibility to experiment with, launch and manage multiple channels at a time — even pop-up channels. Traditionally, broadcasters would invest hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront in building a traditional broadcast facility. Moving operations to the cloud often entails adopting a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which largely shifts accounting practices from capital expenditures to operational expenditures. As a result, establishing multiple channels in the cloud is far more cost-effective. There isn’t a massive initial expenditure; instead, broadcasters can spread the cost over the duration of a contract with a SaaS provider. This approach allows broadcasters to be more experimental and lowers the barrier to launching multiple channels, empowering them to introduce new offerings with minimal investment and very few operational demands.

If broadcasters want to test a channel in a specific market, there’s no need for extensive deliberation due to high costs for equipment, and it doesn’t require a significant financial commitment to get it off the ground. This cloud approach enables experimentation and trying out various ideas without significant upfront planning and costs.

Additionally, the threshold for launching pop-up channels around single live events is currently quite low, given the ease of the process. If broadcasters have the inbound signal, they can efficiently broadcast these events in a cost-effective manner, initiating and terminating these channels without requiring a significant financial investment or extensive internal deliberation. If broadcasters want to establish a channel dedicated exclusively to local high school football, they can launch that channel in the cloud within a few days, run it for a limited time during the football season, and even distribute the feed to other interested platforms. Similarly, thematic channels related to various occasions or special promotions don’t necessitate a substantial investment, allowing for more creativity and experimentation. Whether it’s a Halloween channel, Christmas channel or one dedicated to an awards show or sports event that’s only needed for a few days or weeks, the cloud offers a creative and cost-efficient advantage.

Benefit 3: Ads and Content From FAST Can Be Copied to OTA

In the cloud, broadcasters can also create FAST and OTA versions of their channels and potentially increasing their revenue streams. One of the key divisions between FAST and OTA broadcasting is in the advertising environment. FAST operates in a one-to-one advertising model, where a marker triggers a call to an ad server, leading to a real-time auction for that specific user’s attention. In contrast, OTA is a one-to-many model where broadcasters need to program broadcast advertising deliberately, scheduling different videos between ad markers. But whether displaying a slate in FAST or playing an actual ad in OTA, the process of scheduling remains quite similar.  Taken further, broadcasters can also create a variation of a specific channel for both FAST and OTA, especially on digital subnets. 

By working with a prominent cloud SaaS partner, broadcasters with separate FAST and OTA versions of their channels — complete with different ad environments — can easily connect to an external ad server for broadcast. Here, the server will inform the SaaS partner about which ads to include and when. From there, the SaaS partner can converge the workflows, distributing the FAST version to established platforms using an IP-based stream and, for OTA, distribute the other version to stations via an HLS, SRT, or Zixi stream. Both channels require a specific IP version of their stream, so for the cloud SaaS provider, it’s just another digital endpoint, making the process both seamless and automated. By running the channel as either FAST or OTA depending on its intended market, content would discover a whole new revenue stream for broadcasters, significantly increasing immediate ROI.

Benefit 4: Content Becomes Far More Personal and Localized

Finally, cloud technology allows broadcasters to transform their operations into a cost-efficient and more customized 24/7 linear cable-style service. Thanks to the cloud’s ease of building a channel, opportunities for experimentation and convergent workflows between FAST and OTA, broadcasters can create an entirely new business model. In other words, they can effectively enhance the value of the scheduled content between live local newscasts, which typically serve as the cornerstone of local TV. And in doing so, they can not only avoid spending money on licensing content but also provide greater value to their customers.

Instead of investing in licensing national shows to fill the gaps between newscasts or overnight, broadcasters can use cloud-based content that offers more value to their audience and costs almost nothing. This approach allows them to maintain a local focus, which adds value for viewers. A weather channel might want different graphics layers for various parts of the country, which can be accomplished in the cloud. Similarly, a national news channel may want to incorporate localized segments, where a significant portion of the hour-long national news broadcast is filled intermittently with brief two-minute segments tailored to specific regions. By leveraging the cloud, it’s quite cost-effective to create these subfeed variants. There’s no need for numerous playout engines to support these channels, making these previously expensive considerations more viable and practical when done in the cloud.

Hesitations towards implementing the cloud as the primary playout system will vary among different broadcasters, even those that have already adopted offsite production. However, thanks to the boom in FAST over the last few years, cloud workflows have evolved significantly — far past the point of supporting digital subchannels to fully building and distributing network-affiliated primary OTA channels. The barrier to entry is low, even for those who have not transitioned to NextGen TV. By participating in the cloud-based convergence of FAST and OTA workflows, broadcasters can significantly change their internal operations, discover far more lucrative revenue streams and remain the beloved cornerstone of their local viewers.

On June 23, 2023, the Federal Communications Commission released its “Third Report and Order, Authorizing Permissive Use of the Next Generation Broadcast Television Standard (Third NextGen Report),” confirming the ATSC 3.0 format as the gold standard for over-the-air (OTA) programming. ATSC 3.0 also allows for two-way interactivity, multiscreen applications, 4K (and potentially 8K) resolution, immersive (Dolby AC-4)  audio, mobile reception, possible integration with existing 5G cellular networks, datacasting (ATSC 3.0 uses internet protocol (IP) for signal delivery, so it can also broadcast IP-based data) and much more.

The FCC’s records show that broadcasters are currently using NextGen TV service to deliver a cutting-edge end user experience, and ATSC 3.0 stations are available in 68 markets covering 60% of U.S. households. 

Major station groups — e.g., Fox Television Stations, NBCUniversal Local, Tegna, Sinclair, Nexstar Media Group, etc. — are providing NextGen service in a variety of markets. Those markets include Seattle-Tacoma, Washington; Atlanta; Austin, Texas;  Baltimore; Albuquerque-Santa Fe, New Mexico; Albany, New York; and Birmingham, Alabama; to name a few. This has allowed multiscreen applications, 1080p HDR and 4K resolution, and broadcast apps (interactivity) with direct access to local news assets, OTT content (like Sinclair’s STIRR), radio services, and some point-to-multipoint datacasting, not simply simulcasting. As the deployment of ATSC 3.0 continues and stations expand market acceptance, its full promise will be manifest.

This is why ATSC 3.0 is so crucial: It opens a path forward for broadcasters, and that serves the public interest. The Third NextGen Report announced the following decisions: 

• Allows the simulcasting of multicast 1.0 and 3.0 streams on one or more host stations, but those simulcast multicast streams must be “substantially similar” in both formats;

• Allows a station broadcasting in 3.0 to temporarily modify its license to include one or more 1.0 multicast streams aired on a 1.0 host(s), even if it is not simulcasting on a paired 3.0 stream;

• Limits the number of 1.0 streams a station may host to only the number it has the capacity to transmit within its channel in 1.0; 

• To limit the loss of a station’s 1.0 primary service when migrating to 3.0, a station may, in limited circumstances primarily involving LPTV fill-in service, simulcast its primary stream on a primary stream host and on a different multicast stream host; 

• Extends the requirement that a station’s programming on both its 1.0 and 3.0 service must be “substantially similar” from July 17, 2023 to July 17, 2027; Extends the requirement to comply with the A/322 standard to July 17, 2027, from March 6, 2023;

• Maintains the non-applicability of the FCC’s ownership attribution rule, confirming that hosted multicast streams do not trigger an ownership issue.

While these new requirements are marginal improvements over the current system, they remain overly cumbersome and restrictive. They continue down a course that makes broadcast innovation costly and difficult and maintains an uneven media marketplace that makes the future of free-to-the-home broadcasting unclear. 

As the FCC’s 2022 Quadrennial Review is once again demonstrating, the current media marketplace has a virtually unlimited amount and variety of content options. The seemingly endless increase in the number of devices and platforms available to access that content continue to threaten free broadcasting. Further, the media marketplace is dominated by big tech and telecom titans — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, AT&T, Verizon Communications, Comcast, etc. — none of which are subject to the same Depression-era ownership and regulatory control by the FCC as are broadcasters.

The capital basis of these giant companies is tens and hundreds of times larger than that of the largest broadcaster. That inequality of scale creates an unequal competitive playing field and (unfairly) exacerbates the challenges local stations face in their ability to offer effective service in their local markets, especially smaller ones. This is particularly so in the context of local stations maintaining the “substantially similar” simulcast requirements to introduce and operate a NextGen station.

Broadcasters also face regulatory obstacles to investment and innovation that the giant tech platforms do not, and implementation of new ATSC 3.0 service is no different. As the National Association of Broadcasters recently pointed out in its 2022 Quadrennial Review comments, “wireless carriers, for example, move from one generation of technology to the next on their own terms and on their own schedule, but TV broadcasters must seek FCC approval — with its inevitable delays — to invest millions of their own dollars in their own facilities to improve a service offered free to the public. The commission actively seeks to make additional spectrum available to wireless carriers and for unlicensed services to encourage innovation and deployment of new services, while broadcasters have faced years-long regulatory processes when seeking permission to offer new services, such as ATSC 3.0 and digital audio broadcasting (DAB), using the spectrum already licensed to them.”

Regardless, the FCC’s Third NextGen Report maintains the agency’s regulatory hold on broadcasters and continues to saddle the television industry with significant hurdles to implement a NextGen service. Rather than recognizing market realities and fully enabling broadcasters to enhance their ability to serve viewers and listeners through the technological innovation that ATSC 3.0 allows, the FCC instead maintains a heavy regulatory hand. 

Instead, the FCC should recognize that broadcasters make significant capital investments when adopting new technologies, and prioritize promoting broadcast innovations with the goal of both improving service to the public and the competitive viability of free-to-the-home broadcasting. Allowing greater economies of scale, deregulating its ownership rules and eliminating regulatory hurdles (e.g., broadcasters currently pay almost 60%, or $230 million, of the FCC’s current budget of $390 million in regulatory fees) would allow stations to afford investments in improved technologies like ATSC 3.0, and best serve the public interest. Until that happens, broadcasters remain vulnerable to unfair competition from big tech and the telecom titans, and many broadcasters may well conclude that providing content via unregulated platforms, such as online and internet streaming, is a better economic choice for the future. This risks service in the public interest and risks seeing broadcasting going the way of the newspaper business.

As we commemorate the remarkable 40-year journey of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), it is essential to recognize the pivotal role that high-quality content has played in the success of digital television broadcasting. This significant milestone calls for both celebration and introspection, emphasizing the significance of content in driving the widespread adoption and utilization of ATSC standards, particularly the latest, ATSC 3.0. 

While technology serves as a necessary foundation, it alone is insufficient in the dynamic media industry. The availability of captivating high-quality content is a requisite to unleash the potential of the technology and accelerate its adoption.

During the NextGen Broadcast Conference 2023 on June 15, FCC commissioner Nathan Simington emphasized the importance of differentiating content between ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0, with the aim of attracting viewers to preferentially gravitate towards ATSC 3.0 content. This preference establishes a pathway for the successful transition to the new standard.

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Technology and Content: Reflecting on the remarkable achievements of the ATSC over the past four decades, it becomes evident that the evolution of digital television broadcasting relies on a symbiotic relationship between technology and content. ATSC’s advancements in standards and transmission protocols have paved the way for enhanced viewer experiences and expanded possibilities for content creators. However, it is the creative prowess, innovation and storytelling excellence of content providers that captivates audiences and fosters loyalty.

The Role of Content Producers and Broadcasters: Recognizing the pivotal role that content producers and broadcasters play in driving the demand for ATSC 3.0 is of utmost importance. By understanding the capabilities of ATSC 3.0 and aligning their content production strategies accordingly, producers and broadcasters can effectively leverage the innovations in digital television broadcasting and offer a better quality of experience (QoE).

Understanding the Media Ecology: To comprehend the impact of ATSC and its co-existence with other media technologies, we must acknowledge that no medium operates in isolation. Each medium exists within a broader ecosystem comprising various platforms, technologies and diverse content. Therefore, when introducing a new medium like ATSC 3.0, it becomes crucial to assess its interactions and integration with existing and emerging media, such as traditional broadcast platforms like ATSC 1.0, streaming services, online content platforms like over-the-top (OTT) and FAST channels, as well as DOCSIS 4.0 and 5G.

The Power of AI in Content Production: The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought about a transformative revolution in audiovisual content production, increasing efficiency and unleashing creativity. Through computer vision technologies, the process of capturing, editing and stitching video content has been streamlined, enabling content creators to achieve remarkable results in a fraction of the time. This AI-driven efficiency has reduced the previous barriers of low efficiency and high costs associated with high-quality content production, providing content creators with a newfound freedom to explore their creativity and bring their visions to life.

The Co-Evolutionary Process of the Media Landscape: The media landscape is a dynamic and interconnected ecosystem in which content, technologies, and human experiences co-evolve. This co-evolution entails reciprocal influences and adaptations among these elements, constantly shaping and transforming the media ecosystem over time.

Content creators have a crucial role in cultivating this ecosystem by producing innovative, thought-provoking, and entertaining content that captures attention and resonates with viewers.

Technologies serve as enablers within the media ecosystem, introducing new possibilities and revolutionizing the creation, distribution, and consumption of content.

Human experiences drive the evolution of the media ecosystem, as they influence content preferences and social dynamics that shape the demand for specific types of content and the adoption of different technologies.

This co-evolutionary process is characterized by constant feedback loops and adaptations that drive innovation and progress. Evolving content preferences and user behaviors influence the development of new technologies, creating a continuous cycle of innovations.

In celebrating 40 years of ATSC, it is important to recognize the indispensable role of high-quality content in shaping its success. Content producers and broadcasters hold the key to harnessing the capabilities of this technology and creating exceptional experiences for viewers.

Understanding the interconnected nature of media technologies, content production, and audience experiences is paramount for continuous innovation and adaptation. By nurturing the symbiotic relationship between the medium and content, we can cultivate a vibrant and relevant media landscape that evolves with the needs and preferences of audiences. With a commitment to high-quality content, we can ensure that ATSC’s legacy endures, driving the future of exceptional digital television broadcasting.

The democratization of generative AI has brought about a transformative shift in society, empowering individuals to actively participate in communication and content creation. This shift is exemplified by platforms like ChatGPT and the rise of discursive communication, which have significantly influenced interactive and creative experiences. AI chatbots provide accessible support by offering valuable information, resources and emotional assistance, particularly in situations where human interaction may be challenging. The ability to express oneself to a nonjudgmental AI and the convenience and anonymity of digital communication are highly valued advantages.

However, it is important to recognize the limitations and risks associated with relying solely on AI agents, especially in sensitive and vulnerable situations. While chatbots can provide valuable assistance, they may lack the nuanced understanding, empathy and contextual comprehension that human interactions offer. Authentic human connection and support often prove essential during challenging times, areas where conversational AI may fall short.

Furthermore, the quality and accuracy of information provided by AI agents can vary based on their training data and algorithms. It is crucial to acknowledge that the dissemination of misinformation or biased responses can have serious consequences, particularly when individuals place their trust and reliance on the information provided.

AI chatbots are commonly perceived as objective sources of information, but it is important to be mindful of the influence of “prompt engineering.” When prompts are intentionally designed to promote specific viewpoints or agendas, users may unknowingly internalize and accept those perspectives as objective and unbiased. As a result, a deceptive illusion of objectivity emerges, significantly shaping user perceptions.

AI Interactions Pose Risks

The tragic incident involving Pierre, a Belgian man who died by suicide after prolonged interactions with an AI chatbot, serves as a poignant reminder of the risks and consequences associated with human engagement with AI beings. This incident highlights the potential introduction of unintended biases or manipulation into interactions between humans and AI models. Users, through the injection of specific prompts, may unknowingly perpetuate skewed perspectives or reinforce existing biases present in the training data. These outcomes can further exacerbate societal inequities, foster polarizing viewpoints, and, in extreme cases, even provide fatal advice.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the implications of AI chatbots, which may become the primary avenue for communication and content creation, one should carefully consider their broader impact on individuals and society as a whole.

In the realm of second-order cybernetics, valuable insights are derived regarding the role of the observer in shaping the observed system. Second-order cybernetics emphasizes the concept of reflexivity, which involves the ability to observe and modify one’s own observations and actions. This concept aligns with the high standards of journalism. Prompt engineering, operating within this framework, establishes a feedback loop that incorporates the prompt, the generated output, and its evaluation. Through this iterative process, prompts are adjusted based on the generated results and the user's self-reflection, aiming to achieve desired outcomes and enhance the effectiveness of the generative AI model in producing tailored and high-quality content.

Prompt engineering is inherently subjective, influenced by the biases, intentions, and objectives of different “prompt engineers.” This subjectivity highlights the observer-dependent nature of prompt engineering, where the designed prompts can subtly promote specific agendas or biases, potentially reinforcing a distorted understanding of information and viewpoints.

To maintain a balanced and ethical approach, users of chatbots should be self-aware of their own biases and strive for fairness, inclusivity and responsible use of AI technology in their prompt engineering practices. This requires an ongoing examination of the prompts used to ensure that unintentional biases are not introduced or perpetuated.

Furthermore, the principles of second-order cybernetics highlight the interconnectedness and co-creation between observers (content creators) and systems (generative AI models). Prompt engineering can be viewed as a collaborative process where content creators provide prompts and evaluate the generated output, enabling them to learn from the model's responses, adapt their prompts accordingly, and refine their understanding of the system's capabilities and limitations. This iterative approach allows for a more informed and mindful prompt engineering process.

Ethical Concerns for Content Creators

This perspective raises important ethical questions about the role and responsibilities of observers in shaping AI systems. Prompt engineering carries ethical implications, as the choice of prompts can significantly influence the biases, fairness and quality of the AI model’s output. Content creators bear the responsibility of being mindful of these ethical considerations, striving to mitigate biases, promote inclusivity and ensure responsible use of AI technology in their prompt engineering practices.

In the context of citizen journalism, the significance of journalistic practices in prompt engineering becomes evident. Human oversight and critical thinking are indispensable. Journalists must exercise professional judgment, independently verify information and uphold ethical standards throughout their work. While generative AI models can serve as valuable tools to support and enhance journalistic endeavors, the ultimate responsibility for ensuring accuracy, fairness, and journalistic integrity lies with human journalists.

In conclusion, while AI chatbots offer valuable support and enhance communication experiences, users must be aware of the limitations and risks associated with relying solely on AI agents. Prompt engineering practices should be guided by self-awareness, fairness, inclusivity and responsible use of AI technology. The utilization of second-order cybernetics and adherence to journalistic practices can contribute to mitigating biases and ensuring ethical outcomes. By embracing a balanced approach that combines the strengths of AI chatbots with human involvement, we can navigate the evolving landscape of AI technology and foster a future where AI benefits society in a responsible and inclusive manner.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike reminds us that the media and entertainment industry must be braced for disruption at all times. Four weeks in, it remains unknown when and how writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) will reach a deal. But streamers can’t afford to wait.

While massive conglomerates can pull from their enormous libraries, others will have to shift gears and figure out how to monetize a potential shortage of content. The near future could be a particularly rocky road for companies that rely on scripted content, but finding fresh content is a potential struggle for everyone — exacerbated by an already downward trend in production budgets.  

The companies positioned to fare well, in hindsight, are those that commissioned unscripted shows and overseas productions earlier this year. Intentionally or not, they mitigated the impact of a writers’ strike. But those that don’t fall into that category shouldn’t despair. With the right strategies, audience engagement is possible. 

Advertising and Licensing Revenue

Beginning in 2020, a content shortage due to COVID-imposed production delays hastened the rise of ad-supported streaming. Viewers’ options exploded in the last few years as massive back catalogs were released to AVOD services and FAST channels.

While many FAST channels are built on older TV shows and movies, growing competition has encouraged companies to roll out original content as well. General entertainment, such as movies and series, is the largest genre on FAST; 53% of that content is drama and 47% is unscripted, according to Variety. 

Scripted linear programming will be hardest hit by an extended strike, which could further accelerate studios’ and networks’ shifts to streaming, whether through owned channels and services or expanded licensing. 

If the strike drags out, larger players like The Walt Disney Co. have the luxury of large libraries to compensate for revenues lost from less original content. They have the data and analytical wherewithal to generate value in licensing deals and similar negotiations, too. Companies with an M&A advantage, like Paramount Plus and Showtime, can likewise leverage significant content libraries, content that’s already in the pipeline, or content previously left off their streaming services as they also hold out against the strike. Others will pivot; Amazon recently announced plans to license originals outside its owned services for the first time, via the new Amazon MGM Studios Distribution unit.

Companies that don’t have that breadth of content or partners might not be so lucky. The strike could put enormous pressure on the ecosystem. As the supply of new original content dwindles and competition for audiences (and advertisers) intensifies, the real question for these streaming executives is, “How do I best monetize content in a fragmented revenue landscape?”

The sheer variety of strategies employed by AMPTP member companies and streaming services reveals that the answer varies. Finding it requires the capacity to identify which titles, series, and genres audiences would most watch for a given platform, region, or period of time — and knowing what to do with that information once it’s in hand.

Striking for Data

Data access tilts the power in this environment. A major point of contention between the AMPTP and the WGA is the WGA’s demand to “establish a viewership-based residual — in addition to existing fixed residuals — to reward programs” with “require[d] transparency regarding program views.” 

The writers contend that the current residuals formula, by which they are compensated based largely on the traditional linear model of total subscribership, fails to account for the complex economics of streaming. 

This echoes calls for transparency throughout the industry. In 2021, actor Scarlett Johansson settled a lawsuit against Disney over payments for the film Black Widow. Johansson alleged that Disney’s decision to release the film to streaming during its theatrical window, which Disney attributed to COVID theater shutdowns, was a breach of contract. Streaming viewership — and the residuals that could have resulted from it — had not been accounted for in her contract.

Studios, streamers and talent all understandably want to retain as much value as possible from their investments. That’s difficult given the dynamic, disruptive nature of the media and entertainment today. Collecting and validating payments such as viewership-based residuals would require streaming services to provide data that they are resistant to disclosing. It’s created tension with content sellers and licensors as well.  

An industry standard for “transparency” has yet to be defined, but all parties clearly agree that content data is an asset in this incredibly competitive, fast-moving market. Those who can access and analyze data have a leg up on those who don’t (or can’t). 

Lasting Impact

The media and entertainment industry is still experiencing the ripple effects of the 2007-2008 writers’ strike and the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential implications of the 2023 strike are similarly far-reaching:

• Data transparency disputes will take center stage, with streaming services reluctant to disclose what they consider proprietary metrics amidst rising demand from anyone with a revenue stake.
• SVOD churn and cord-cutting will continue apace or accelerate depending on economic winds and the content that is, or is not, offered.
• The growth rate for ad-supported models could also accelerate as unscripted content fills the gap, scripted content is made newly available and cash-conscious consumers take the free option. Conversely, if economic concerns restrict or reallocate ad budgets, media companies may find it difficult to drive profits through both linear and ad-supported streaming.
• Generative AI will become a point of increasing contention as large language models like ChatGPT create perceived threats and push the boundaries of innovation.

Most media companies have little say about when this strike will end or on what terms. But that doesn’t mean this can’t be a time to deploy a more resilient content strategy built on data.

Moving forward, power (in partnerships, licensing and advertising deals) will lean towards the company that has the clearest view of the data, including who is watching, when they watch and what they are watching. The strike has revealed just how critical content revenue and performance analytics are for the many changing distribution models in play.

This strike is about much more than data. But that’s a big part of it. The industry should take note — and action.

We know that consumer data sets are a valuable tool for businesses to understand, serve and target consumers. 

When accurate, consumer data can reveal information about behaviors, messaging preferences and purchasing habits, and increase precision targeting and ROI. But recent U.S. state privacy laws — while well-meaning — are starting to prohibit the collection of “sensitive” information, specifically around details like race and ethnicity, that can actually drive a more positive and relevant experience for every consumer.

It’s argued that removing ethnicity data is necessary to protect individual privacy and prevent discrimination. That’s a valid (and warranted) critique, but there’s also another side of the coin: Race and ethnicity data is essential to accurately represent diverse audiences.

For brands, agencies and publishers, race and ethnicity data is often used to target specific groups with marketing messages and products tailored to their interests and needs. Losing this information, certain communities may be inadvertently excluded or overlooked. That could mean both lost revenues for businesses and an overall lack of representation for various marginalized audience groups.

For instance, a beauty brand may want to target a variety of consumers — men and women, darker and lighter skin tones, etc. — with specific messaging. Losing ethnicity data means you’re potentially delivering the same message to a Hispanic man as you are to an Asian-American woman. Or perhaps a hair product is designed specifically for Black consumers’ needs. 

There’s a concentrated audience to speak to there, and without ethnicity data, it’s turning intentionally helpful targeting and customization into an unnecessary array of guesswork.

This is without even digging into the existing issues around race and ethnicity data that ultimately gets worse by simply cutting it out of data sets. At Truthset, we’ve found that 74% of ethnicity data for African-Americans consumers was accurate in Q4 2022. Just 78% was accurate for Asian-Americans and 89% was accurate for Hispanic Americans. Those numbers get almost twice as bad as source data passes through onboarding and modeling processes common in programmatic advertising. 

This informs us that there’s already an issue serving these audiences. So why are we willing to exacerbate this issue further?

Having access to race and ethnicity data can actually allow advertisers, agencies and publishers to address systemic marketing discrimination, identifying where blind spots and inequality have existed in the past to try and actively avoid it going forward. 

While we can put safeguards in place to prevent data from being used improperly, you could contend there’s a greater chance of addressing societal concerns around race (and other sensitive information) by quantifying proper representation of these populations.

This is growing increasingly crucial across many demographic and psychographic lines today as the monoculture largely breaks down. Knowing what is culturally relevant on a large scale could now represent just a quarter of the U.S. population — and perhaps a small subsection of a brand or publisher’s intended audience. Access to accurate ethnicity data helps fight tired ideas, opening doors for brands and consumers that may not have had a chance to thrive in the past.

There is more work to be done to ensure that ethnicity data is collected and utilized accurately and ethically. But the idea of that hard work shouldn’t preclude the advertising industry from doing so.

Working with state and federal regulators, the entire industry can plot a way forward that benefits all parties involved and makes sure that future privacy initiatives are both consumer-safe and act in the interest of serving consumers better experiences as well.

Standard General’s acquisition of some 60 broadcast stations from Tegna would create the nation’s largest minority-owned and woman-led broadcast company in U.S. history and enshrine historic jobs commitments and a neutrality agreement for all Tegna unions. In addition to an $8.6 billion investment in local media, the transaction supports Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Biden administration diversity goals. The transaction passed review unchallenged by the Department of Justice. However, it has been sidelined by the chair of the FCC, which controls the transfer of broadcast licenses. The deal has languished for more than 400 days, a record for the FCC which normally processes such rule-compliant TV license transfers in 182 days.

In March the FCC’s Media Bureau, with the support of chair Jessica Rosenworcel, referred the transaction to the Media Bureau’s administrative law judge on the issues of station staffing levels and retransmission fees for pay TV providers. This was unusual and something which has never happened for such a simple transaction. Moreover, the parties have already resolved these issues with agreements to maintain current station news staffing levels for at least three years following closing and the waiving of all contract rights that might have increased retransmission fees for pay TV providers from the transaction. Furthermore, these two issues — station staffing levels and retransmission fees for pay TV providers — are statutorily outside the FCC’s authority, a fact which the full commission itself has noted in every prior TV transaction in which these arguments have been raised.

One interpretation of the FCC chair’s action is that Democratic Party leaders want donor Byron Allen to win the deal (his first attempt to acquire Tegna fell apart), not Soo Kim, a Korean-American entrepreneur. So sending the deal to regulatory purgatory while the deadline to close the transaction expires (May 22) is a way to kill the deal without having to take a commission vote. GOP commissioners Carr and Simington have called for a vote in the meantime.

Outraged at the lack of fairness and progress on diversity goals, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), co-sponsor of the The Broadcast Varied Ownership Incentives for Community Expanded Services Act (Broadcast VOICES Act), threatened to hold up the reconfirmation of Democratic FCC member Geoffrey Starks if Rosenworcel doesn’t call for the vote. This would lead the FCC with two Republicans and one Democrat, chair Rosenworcel. Key civil rights and social justice groups Asian Americans Advancing Justice, National Action Network, National Urban League and UnidosUS have urged Rosenworcel and the FCC to take the vote. They do not ask for one outcome versus another, just that the process is served.

The FCC was chartered to protect the public interest in the transfer of telecommunications licenses. Its commissioners now have more information in front of them than any TV transfer transaction ever. The full commission has both the power and the obligation to execute FCC process for license transfers. A vote on the Standard General-Tegna deal would restore the trust which has been muddied by the ALJ mix-up. Sometimes democracy is just about taking a vote, rather than passing the buck.

Editor's note: The author has no relationship with the parties nor financial interest in the transaction.

The key to a strong and healthy democracy is an informed and engaged public. Receiving trustworthy and informative news — especially at the local level — is how we stay engaged.

A 2022 Gallup poll showed Americans have greater trust in local news than national news. That’s because we depend on local coverage to help us navigate issues like school closures, respond to emergency events and make choices about how we want to be governed.

But local news is facing a stiff headwind as it fights to remain viable in an environment where media consolidation is gutting newsrooms across the country. That is why Common Cause is opposed to gigantic hedge funds and investment groups taking over media outlets — because inevitably, they are in it to extract profits.

Right now, the hedge fund Standard General is promising that it will be the exception to the rule if it secures Federal Communications Commission approval to purchase Tegna, a media company with broadcast stations from Seattle to San Antonio. The FCC referred the case to an administrative law judge, which is usually the end of the line for mergers. But when the judge indicated a review of the proposed merger could not be completed in time to meet the financing deadline for the deal, Standard General-Tegna mounted an expensive public relations campaign, promising the world to certain groups to buy their support. When they had a chance to commit to those plans in its filings with the federal government, though, Standard General-Tegna did not present a shred of evidence that the deal would have any benefit to the public.

We have seen what happens when mega-conglomerates buy out companies. They slash jobs and mass-produce content. You can count on more car-chase stories and bear break-in videos.

Strip-mining for profits is what hedge funds do. They buy out companies, fire staff, sell off the profitable pieces and dump the rest.

Take for example The Los Angeles Times, my local paper. In 2007, when Sam Zell’s Equity Group, took control of The Tribune Co. and by extension, the Times, it cost over $8 billion. At the time, the Chicago-based investment group promised it would not cut newsroom jobs. By 2008, after multiple rounds of cuts, it was announced that a further 250 would lose their jobs.

That all turned around in 2018 when Patrick Soon-Shiong, a Los Angeles-based surgeon and cancer researcher, decided to purchase The Los Angeles Times. Under local ownership, the paper once again invested in local reporters, diversified the newsroom and rebuilt the California Section. Now, I can read about local businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf working to bring Black authors to Pasadena’s only black-owned bookstore in honor of local author, and store namesake, Octavia Butler.

I can count on the kind of in-depth local reporting that uncovered secret tapes of Los Angeles City Council members scheming behind closed doors over redistricting lines. That coverage ignited a citywide debate over what we want our government to look like — one that may result in fundamental changes to redistricting, how we vote and what we expect of our elected representatives.

That’s the power of journalism that centers the communities they serve.

By contrast, the scorched-earth approach of hedge funds has long-term consequences on our democracy. Without an informed, engaged, and empowered citizenry, we won’t be able to tackle our collective challenges. When the public is uninformed, we have lower civic participation, lower voter turnout and greater political polarization.

When we don’t have a town square for deliberative democracy, people start wandering down dark alleys and political rabbit holes. The void left by local and ethnic media is so easily filled with disinformation.

The rapid decrease in local news should alarm everyone, especially heading into yet another consequential election year. With fewer resources to combat disinformation and hold power accountable, we have to do what we can to protect our local newsrooms.

There’s a reason that freedom of speech and the right to a free press are in the very First Amendment. Without a trusted platform for local voices, communities lose the ability to watchdog local government, hold leaders accountable, advocate for themselves, and bring awareness to issues that could never be adequately covered by a national outlet. Cities and communities lose the power of storytelling and collective problem-solving.

Quality local journalism is a public good. It’s right that the FCC takes its time to evaluate whether to approve another media consolidation. When it comes to our democracy, we can’t afford to sell it to the highest bidder.

For the past few years, during the spring lead-up to the upfronts, I felt sure that the coming year would be a turning point for programmatic buying. But I’m not sure it has quite happened yet — so what about this year?

Based on the technology, scale, and capabilities of programmatic TV advertising, I believe programmatic could be playing a much bigger role in television advertising transactions, unlocking efficiencies for advertisers and sellers alike. Viewing on platforms that enable programmatic activations is skyrocketing.  But while eMarketer estimates that over 80% of U.S. households that subscribe to pay TV are addressable, programmatic buying makes up only 10% to 20% of TV ad buying.

Why the disconnect? Why has a capability with a wealth of potential benefits for our industry reached a plateau? More importantly, how can we overcome any hurdles to get programmatic working for more TV advertisers? Here are a few challenges and how we can overcome them as an industry.

Uncertainty About Quality 

For some advertisers, “programmatic” still brings to mind images of auctions on low-quality, remnant inventory that was prevalent first in digital display media, and later in digital video. Of course, this is no longer true, as programmatic TV advertising operates in the same high-quality inventory as traditionally bought TV — including live sports. When the industry can embrace programmatic as a buying strategy, rather than a definition of inventory quality, we will be taking an important step towards its future.  

A Perceived Lack of Value

The future of programmatic comes down to the numbers: does the benefit outweigh the added cost? 

The simple answer is yes, it should, especially when programmatic is executed directly with the most optimized supply path that eliminates middlemen and unnecessary tech taxes. While the upfront costs may be higher, the ROI is higher too thanks to advanced targeting and the ability to optimize campaigns in real time — making programmatic as cost-effective as direct buys, or even more.

But it’s not just cost benefits. In addition, improved automation, reporting and ease of use make programmatic a measurable and quantitative value-add for buyers. And, when executed in tandem with direct buys, programmatic can unlock TV as a full-funnel marketing vehicle. 

Fear of Losing Control 

Both buyers and sellers fear losing control in the either-or scenario of guaranteed vs. biddable activation strategies. In guaranteed activations, buyers can feel like they lose decisioning power over inventory, while in fully biddable activations sellers can feel like they lose control over how and when a buyer is going to activate. 

The key to maintaining control on both sides is communication and collaboration. Yes — even though the buying is automated, the relationships still matter! When a buyer, seller and ad-tech partner can agree to deal types, parameters and goals ahead of time, and then manage those criteria holistically through a direct tech connection, they can ensure they are not relinquishing control or transparency they need for their campaign management.  

The Future of Programmatic  

In its ideal state, programmatic buying for TV and premium video advertising is an automated, biddable environment that provides control and optionality for advertisers and lets them buy and manage their TV buying much like they would a digital campaign, while maintaining the high quality and ROI of premium video and TV advertising. With this type of programmatic approach in place, advertisers would expect more effective return on media spend, while publishers have the chance to open up new revenue streams. 

At this year’s upfronts, we can lean more into the automation and efficiency offered through programmatic — but also shake hands, take a lunch and meet new possible partners. By building out relationships and connecting with those on the other side of the programmatic paradigm, you’re creating the win-win-win for the buyer, seller, and the advertiser.   

In the coming weeks, negotiations about transaction models and data will be just as important as negotiations about programming and pricing. So watch out — the programmatic upfronts may finally be here. 

Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel should be commended for the agency’s careful decision to refer the effort by hedge fund Standard General and private-equity fund Apollo Global Management to take over broadcaster Tegna to an administrative law judge (ALJ) at the regulator. There, the facts can be clearly determined around the public-interest standards at stake, including localism, consumer prices, the impact on jobs and diversity of media ownership. 

I was proud when my organization, Public Knowledge, joined with labor unions, civil rights groups, public interest nonprofits, and multiple companies to raise questions about Standard General and Apollo taking over the nation’s second-largest local broadcast TV station owner, Tegna. For years our organizations have fought to stem the tide of media consolidation that is contributing to the gutting of newsroom staffs and the reduction in truly local content to meet the needs of diverse communities across our nation. 

Hedge funds have a history of stripping their new acquisitions down for parts to cut large costs quickly, including firing workers and scaling back operations. In the case of broadcast channels, hedge funds look to cut back on local news and other diverse, targeted programming in favor of national content. FCC filings have shown that this acquisition was structured in a complicated way in order for Standard General to enter into joint retransmission consent negotiations to increase costs for cable TV subscribers. These public interest concerns are always considered in FCC license transfers and certainly warrant a hearing with the agency’s administrative law judge. 

A fact-finding hearing in front of an ALJ makes sense if FCC staff feels it does not have full, accurate information, or a clear picture of the transaction. In addition to the concerns about loss of local content and media consolidation, all parties controlling broadcast licenses in the U.S. are subject to laws about ownership or control by non-U.S. citizens. Concerns over foreign ownership from Apollo Global Management’s stake in the deal must be addressed. Normally after an FCC referral to the ALJ, the parties trying to get a deal approved would withdraw their applications and maybe try again with a different deal structure. Not this time. Instead, Standard General, with a self imposed deadline of May 22 to close the deal, has engaged in an  expensive Washington smear and influence campaign that has become all too familiar around the FCC debates lately. 

In 2022 the public saw a bad-faith smear campaign about issues outside the FCC’s jurisdiction sink a nominee to the commission. Democratic elected officials failed to be unified behind seating a strong public-interest advocate at the FCC in response to this influence campaign. Now, in 2023, we’ve seen chair Rosenworcel’s FCC criticized by Democrats like Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) for simply following agency processes to get detailed answers about a major broadcast acquisition. In fact, Senator Menendez openly threatened the renomination of the only commissioner of color at the FCC, Geoffrey Starks, and by implication his own party’s ability to control the FCC agenda. Our hope is that such criticism and direct threats to the agency’s important consumer-protection work does not prevent the FCC from doing its investigation and making judgments based on the facts of the transaction. Now more than ever, Congress and the public need expert regulators protecting the public from tech and media consolidation. While we wait for Congress to create a regulator for dominant digital platforms, we already have an expert agency for media and telecommunications in the FCC. Its mandate to protect the public is clear and the debate around this transaction should focus on those protections and the transaction's details.

On this transaction, the Rosenworcel FCC has led with clear, simple process and standard questions. The timing may be difficult for Standard General, but that is their responsibility to adjust their transaction and timeline to fit the necessary review, not the other way around.

TV advertising is in the midst of a total transformation, driven by the prevalence of online streaming services that have led to a shift in consumer behavior and a new era of content consumption. Importantly, these streaming services are delivered by internet-connected TVs (CTVs), which provide for the first time the ability for TV content and advertising to be measured in a closed-loop system that enables the measurement of business outcomes that are associated with ad exposure, just like digital advertising. And as if this wasn't enough change for the TV industry, enter artificial intelligence (AI), which will accelerate the pace and scope of the TV industry’s transformation.  

For many decades, the TV industry has been relatively stable, with around $70 billion in revenue driven mostly by 500 or so major national advertisers making large ad buys based on “reach and frequency” and designed to drive awareness against target consumer demographics. The recent shift towards streaming services like Hulu, Roku and Peacock, coupled with the rise of connected TVs, has made TV just as measurable as online search and social advertising. New self-serve TV platforms have democratized access to TV, enabling millions of search and social performance advertisers to move into TV as a growth-driving medium. This shift is underway and will have a radical impact on the TV ecosystem.

AI will change the game yet again. With the help of AI, advertisers will be able to create TV-ready video ads by simply providing text inputs. AI algorithms will enable marketers to refine the ad and create multiple versions of the same ad with element-level differences, from major changes like an actor’s gender, color scheme or messaging, to more subtle alterations like frame rate, aspect ratio, types of clothing worn, volume, etc. Advertisers will be able to test multiple versions of ads on TV-buying platforms that provide feedback on exposure-to-outcome, to determine which combinations of creative elements drive the best performance (where performance equals outcomes like sales or return on advertising spend, or ROAS).

Moreover, TV buying and optimization platforms will use AI to optimize ads for outcomes, leveraging all versions of ad creatives in combination with an endless set of non-creative variables (such as context, audience profiles, daypart, frequency, etc.) to drive optimal results.  

Ultimately, creative development platforms will merge with TV buying and optimization platforms, enabling marketers to create TV ads with one-click simplicity, and then leverage AI systems to optimize creative and media buying using an endless set of variables.  This optimization approach, executed at the nexus of creative and real-time/programmatic TV buying, will transform TV from a reach and awareness medium into a powerful outcome-based medium, leveraging the unique TV attributes — sight, sound, emotion via large-screen, uncluttered delivery — to drive ads with higher impact and better ROI than any other advertising medium.  

AI is already accelerating the transformation of TV.  Within the next few years, TV will be accessible by millions of advertisers via democratized TV buying consoles that will be able to create ads, then deploy and optimize them using AI. The consequence will be a new TV advertising landscape that proves its value in a wholly measurable way.

Changes in the TV market in the last 12 months have been nothing short of breathtaking.

Streaming overtook linear TV for the first time in late 2022. All the major streaming services now have or are set to launch ad-supported offerings. Meanwhile, a staggering 82% of all U.S. households have at least one internet-connected TV and the average consumer subscribes to four services.

In short, TV is lit right now.

It’s also massively fragmented. Signals, supply chains and measurement methods are all over the map and getting more complicated all the time.

In our current media landscape, there are two principal drivers of change. On the one hand, new and forthcoming privacy standards (and the actions of platforms to comply with them) have deprecated the cookie and mobile IDs while giving rise to new categories such as customer data platforms (CDPs), clean rooms and alternative IDs. On the other hand, the rise of new channels like connected TV (CTV) and the shift toward omnichannel media consumption have forced marketers to seek new ways to target, buy and measure advertising while transforming their own workflows and operations.

Agencies, publishers, ad-tech companies and everyone in between have a vested interest in helping their partners navigate this newfound complexity. Fragmentation makes data, technology and services even more essential than ever before. When everything is broken into pieces that don’t talk to each other, the connective tissue becomes absolutely vital.

There are several things that are vital for overcoming the challenges posed by fragmentation and delivering value for brands and advertisers at scale, and your TV/CTV partner should be equipped with all of them: 

Converged media planner services (CMPs): These call for inventory recommendations on reach and frequency against audiences that media planners want to use. When you have fragmentation, it’s hard to optimize for reach or frequency, but a CMP can overcome that. 

Advanced currency providers (ACPs): Advanced currency providers are being offered adjacent to legacy Nielsen measurement for national TV. And Nielsen, Comscore, VideoAmp and iSpot are the tip of the measurement iceberg with more on the way; what matters are business outcomes, and advanced currencies aim to provide a better picture of those results and a good ACP provider will offer that. 

Analytics: Having brought all channels under one roof and united them into a single workflow, the next step is to seamlessly infuse every phase of the process with intelligence and analytics. Brands need to be able to harness their first-, second- and third-party data to resolve identities, build audiences, model lookalike audiences, and map audiences to an individual or household. From there, brands can activate those audiences across all channels in a privacy-safe way.

Deep linear and digital TV knowledge: This may surprise some people, but video advertising was not invented with the internet. The first TV ad ran in July 1941(!) and since then there have been 80-plus years of learning about what works and why that is massively relevant in an omnichannel world. Finding a provider who knows TV and digital will enable advertisers to be successful understanding audiences and driving engagement across formats.

TV advertising may be complex and fragmented, but it remains an essential communication channel for brands. With the right mix of services to overcome fragmentation, the convergence of TV and video represents an enormous opportunity for brands to connect with consumers in a truly omnichannel way — especially for advertisers that get there early.

FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel was right to back up the chief of her Media Bureau in February in ruling that hedge fund Standard General’s proposed takeover of Tegna’s 64 local news stations across 51 U.S. markets deserves further scrutiny. The $8.6 billion deal is being funded in part by the country’s largest private-equity firm, Apollo Global Management, which already controls another vast local TV chain, Cox Media Group.

We have already seen the detrimental effects that Wall Street control of local journalism produces — news deserts for local communities created by consolidation and even increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals.

Now, Wall Street funds like Apollo Global Management have turned their attention to broadcast TV, and it is crucial to determine if the Standard General-Tegna megamerger will serve the public interest, and not reduce coverage of local issues, impose viewpoints that are out of step with the community, or put jobs in local newsrooms at risk. Over 80% of Americans say they find local news coverage on television and radio to be most trustworthy. We must not violate that trust by ceding control of local news to a handful of hedge funds.

Standard General’s response to the Federal Communications Commission’s request for additional review should also raise alarm bells. The company’s managing partner, Soo Kim, reacted to the FCC’s decision to take a closer look by accusing the agency of an “unaccountable power grab,” claiming that “jobs and pricing are not technically issues that fall under the Media Bureau's jurisdiction” and even going so far as to challenge the constitutionality of how the FCC oversees broadcast licensing and telecommunications.

Wall Street investment firms like Standard General and Apollo have been at the root of local print journalism’s demise, buying newspapers and other news media, laying off journalists and selling off real estate and other remaining assets. Alden Global Capital, for example, eviscerated the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, among many others. When Soo Kim wanted to attack the FCC for scrutinizing his hedge fund's takeover of Tegna, he turned to Alden’s network of newspapers, which published the exact same editorial in over a half-dozen of its supposedly local papers. This is exactly what the FCC is trying to prevent — an increasingly homogeneous media landscape dominated by the voices of the wealthy and powerful.

At a time when disinformation is threatening our democracy and the public is looking for greater transparency, accuracy and accountability from elected officials, it is critical that we protect journalism at the local level. We need more journalists covering local school boards, county governments, environmental disasters or corrupt politicians wasting taxpayer money, not fewer. The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET-CWA), alongside our colleagues in America's largest labor union of journalists, The NewsGuild-CWA, took a stand for journalism and democracy and petitioned the FCC to reject the deal. We stood up against the greed of Wall Street with truth on our side and showed that contrary to their statements to the FCC, Standard General sold the deal to its bankers by specifying the local station jobs it would cut to increase profits.

We explained how Standard General and Apollo concocted a scheme to jack up rates paid by cable and satellite companies that would be passed onto consumers in the midst of a highly inflationary period. We won support from key members of Congress, such as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Energy and Commerce Committee chair Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). After an exhaustive, year-long proceeding, we were proud to see chair Rosenworcel take action in February.

In years past, the FCC has not given weight to arguments about whether buyers like Standard General and Apollo would cut costs by eliminating jobs and local programming. But “real-world experience,” they noted, should lead to questioning whether the acquisition of dozens of local broadcast news stations by private investment funds “would promote, hinder, or indeed, have no effect on localism.”

It matters when hedge funds and private-equity funds have control of our local news sources, and thankfully now, an FCC in-house judge will convene a hearing to get to the bottom of this complicated transaction.

Soo Kim can claim that the FCC has “denied due process,” but in fact, this is what it looks like.

Any experienced telecom practitioner can share the basic truth that from time to time the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) simply makes mistakes and occasionally even skirts outside the bounds of its legal authority. While generally well-meaning, the agency is not infallible and it can be overly aggressive to serve select agendas. 

To rectify this, there is a cherished right and longstanding practice that any party that has standing can challenge the commission to reconsider an action or petition the court to set aside a particular decision.  Sometimes these challenges have strong arguments and win; often, they do not. 

But what should concern everyone is when the FCC intentionally skews the process so much that objecting parties are procedurally prohibited from seeking any reasonable form of recourse.  A few weeks ago, the commission did just this.  By sidestepping the traditional determinative process, the agency’s staff, under newly found delegated authority, attempted to silently kill off the transfer of broadcast licenses between Tegna and Standard General. In essence, the highly-discredited and objectional procedure — known in FCC parlance as a Hearing Designation Order — attempts to send the application off on a slow boat to nowhere. Intentionally, this blatant process abuse likely will force parties to abandon their transaction without due process. If the commissioners themselves do not overturn this, which I have argued multiple times to allow delegated items to be brought before the full commission for a vote, I hope the court system will drop the red flag to restore fairness and justice.   

To understand the outrageousness of the HDO, it is important to consider the timing of its adoption.  While the commission moves glacially slow on so many matters, the transfer of licenses for broadcast television and radio stations tends to generate the strictest scrutiny and the longest delays. Applications involving media licenses can be delayed, bumping up against or exceeding the commission’s “aspirational” merger shot clock of 180 days. In the case of Tegna, the timeline has already stretched almost a full year. After multiple rounds of comment requests, the record was very complete, and it was essentially ready for a final decision. At the very last minute, the agency mic-drops the HDO under the guise of finding facts on select issues. 

Consider that if the agency wanted to explore the designated issues, it had almost an entire year to do so.  It previously publicly sought comment on applicants’ concessions for the very issues the HDO is supposedly exploring.  Further, knowing how critical timing was to applicants, it could have set a narrow but definitive window for the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) to conduct her work.  Yet, it did neither. 

Having served at the commission for many years and having been involved in prior HDOs, the justification provided in this case is really fiction. It is common knowledge within the FCC and its  legal bar that the HDO process is a longstanding, bipartisan tool to kill transactions via the back door. It was that way under the commission of chairman Tom Wheeler, when it threatened to use it in the Comcast-Time Warner Cable application, and the same under the Ajit Pai commission’s use in the Sinclair Broadcast Group-Tribune Media proposed transaction.  The agency has an undefeated record of successfully executing HDOs, and in some cases merely suggesting its use to parties, to end mergers.  I refer to this process as a proverbial black hole as no entity ever escapes its clutches. To pretend an HDO in this instance is otherwise requires an immeasurable suspension of disbelief.

Critics of the merger may attack my views, suggesting I give no credence to the merits of their claims.  The truth is that the substance is given short shrift by the agency when it adopted the HDO. Had the commission used a legitimate process, it could have given the applicants direction to resolve or even adopt opponents’ positions with appropriate retransmission consent firewalls and exorbitant station budgets. Certainly, it’s not hard to craft strengthened concessions to sufficiently ameliorate the concerns raised, despite any personal objections I might have. And the agency could have set a time deadline for the hearing of 30 or 60 days, which could have worked for the applicants and their financiers. But the agency went silent, avoiding any communications over how to fix any perceived deficiencies in the application, and moved to launch an ALJ review without time limits.

FCC process reform has been a multidecade project for me, becoming a career priority, because I firmly believe that the American people expect government officials to be fair — in processes used and decisions made. Adoption of the HDO in the Tegna transaction is anything but.  Hopefully, this can be remedied before it’s too late, and certainly before the next time it is contemplated.   

Remember when everyone was obsessed with Tiger King? Or, more recently, as friends and family exhorted that you must start watching Yellowstone? Perhaps you, like millions of others, started Googling the cost of Peacock and Paramount Plus subscriptions (and possibly shopping for Stetsons). It’s happening again this month as the Oscar bump surrounding Everything Everywhere All at Once is driving a surge in streaming across Showtime and iTunes platforms. 

While the fervor surrounding these breakout hits has helped catapult more than a dozen different streaming services into the spotlight almost overnight, there are a couple of big problems hanging in the balance that should be keeping the purveyors of today’s hottest content awake at night. The hit show halo doesn’t last very long. Once the must-see mania surrounding the latest pop cultural phenomenon dies down, many streaming customers are left with a clunky, disjointed user experience that is widely perceived to be too expensive.

User data confirms this. According to J.D. Power data, many streaming-service customers pick and choose their subscriptions based on the content available. Nearly one-third (29%) of live TV streaming customers said they selected the provider because they had content they wanted to see compared with only 8% for cable/satellite TV subscribers. 

That’s fine when a highly anticipated original series like 1923 premieres, or when a box-office darling like Top Gun: Maverick is finally available at the push of a button, but it leaves streaming platforms susceptible to a wide ebb and flow in their subscription numbers when the content luster loses its shine.

Streamers Don’t Stick

While streaming customers are generally more satisfied with their experience than cable or satellite customers, these subscribers aren’t quite as likely to stick around for the long haul. This was clear when we asked why consumers subscribed to each individual service.

Overall, 61% of Paramount Plus subscribers, 55% of Discovery Plus homes and 52% of Peacock subs said they chose these platforms because they had content they wanted to see. These percentages were also high for Starz (49%), HBO Max (46%) and Netflix (45%). 

In comparison, just 29% said the same of Amazon Prime Video and 35% of ESPN Plus. These two services could be outliers for many reasons, specifically how subscribers interact with them. Prime Video is given free of charge to all Amazon Prime subscribers, a rite of passage for most households. And ESPN Plus is part of the Disney bundle that includes Disney Plus and Hulu, so many subscribers purchase all three for the monthly deal.

For others, it’s a tenuous position in which no one — not even a platform as ubiquitous as Netflix — is exempt from widespread subscriber volatility. Between paying for content — both legacy and original — customer acquisition, infrastructure and a host of other unseen costs, most services are squarely in the red. The only antidote to those losses is padding the subscriber count, and with customers constantly being swayed by the latest hits, the recipe for steady, consistent growth remains unclear. 

Meanwhile, the very business model that gave birth to many of today’s biggest hits is being challenged as streaming services and Hollywood studios cut back on programming and shelve many small-to-mid-budget projects. Together, the simultaneous trends of streaming service proliferation and austerity measures in Hollywood are putting an increased reliance on a handful of blockbuster hits that is likely to severely limit the number of streaming services who can survive for the long haul.

Earning More Loyalty

The nature of streaming isn’t likely to change all at once, but there are incremental steps services can take to combat some of this volatility. 

For starters, user interfaces need to be more intuitive and universal. According to our data, the user interface is exceedingly important to live TV streaming customers, consistently ranked among the top three most important key performance indicators. Eliminating the steep learning curve that comes from getting acclimated with a new streaming service would go a long way to addressing some of customers’ most common pain points. 

Even more than a clean interface, streaming services need to find a way to provide value at their price point. A la carte television hasn’t quite lived up to the promises of a decade ago, where customers would be able to pick and choose their content and save money along the way. More than half (56%) of live TV streaming customers in the U.S. say they choose their plan because of price, and it’s not uncommon for streaming customers to have more than one subscription. As these platforms contemplate a crackdown on password sharing and continue to make content decisions that are grounded more in their bottom line than making compelling television for their customers, services run the risk of leaving those customers feeling like their dollar isn’t stretching quite as far.

Back to the Future

As the industry is inching to a tipping point, it feels like the future of streaming is in transition. As parent companies quickly try to recoup losses by propping up ad-supported models — making the future of television look an awful lot like the past — customers may become more discerning about their monthly streaming allotment. 

That means that a competitive field is going to get a lot more cutthroat. While content will always be king, the platforms that listen to their customers and meet them where they are will have an easier time navigating the uncertainty. And in an era of consolidation, that might make all the difference between existing five years from now and not.

Careers are interesting things. When you start out, you don’t really know what you are doing, and nobody works for you, but you invariably work for lots of people. You learn by doing, watching, getting it right and getting it wrong. And, if you’re lucky, through the help of your colleagues and leaders, you start to grow. Slowly, we amass the skills and insights necessary to progress whether that means into management or more deeply as an individual contributor. Throughout the process, consciously or unconsciously, we’re always learning. 

Over the 20-plus years I’ve been in advertising — through my work, network, and great organizations like IRTS Foundation, She Runs It and NAMIC — I’ve had the opportunity to speak with lots of groups and individuals about the things I have learned on my journey. When I talk with people just starting out, inevitably a lot of questions come up around how to navigate a career, especially in an industry that is constantly changing. One of my recent mentee groups asked me to write some of those lessons down. It’s a long list but I am eager to try “pay it forward” by sharing more broadly 26 lessons learned or actionable insights that hopefully resonate.

I would be remiss not to include here a big thank you to all the colleagues, friends, mentors, and allies that have been and continue to be my teachers — generously sharing their wisdom with me. 

1. It’s the professor, not the class. The people you work with and for will make or break your happiness and long-term success more than any other factor. Choose wisely.
2. You become successful by making other people successful. That means your customers, team, boss, peers, colleagues, partners, etc.
3. If you feel like you don’t fit in, remember that what makes you different is a source of unique (and needed) value.
4. Time is a finite resource. Make good choices about where and with whom you spend yours.
5. Don’t compromise on operating with integrity and respect for others and yourself.
6. Never underestimate your (or another’s) ability to learn new things so long as you (or they) are willing to make a sincere and sustained effort.
7. Wisdom comes from unexpected sources and in unexpected packaging. Strive to be an avid reader and active listener; there is something you can learn from every conversation, person, or experience.
8. Take care of yourself and others. Give yourself and others grace and kindness. We’re all only human.
9. Take the enterprise view. It immediately elevates you, your thinking and your work.
10. Learn to be a good storyteller. Humans are wired for narrative, and a story is much more memorable, compelling and shareable than a collection of data or facts. 
11. There is huge value in simplifying. This also applies to communication. Strive to use less jargon, fewer words or metrics, and shorter lists (I am breaking my own rule here!).
12. Your actions and how you consistently show up every day will define your experience more than what you studied, where you went to school, what company you work at, what your job title is.
13. You are the steward of your own experience and career.
14. You can lead from any level or position. If you want a bigger platform, start with the one you are standing on. Choose how you show up. Leaders think about what groups and teams need and contribute in ways that are additive. An act of leadership can be as simple as the energy and body language you bring into a meeting.
15. Being able to disagree with someone or critique something openly, productively, constructively and keep the conversation positive, is a valuable skill. Find low-stakes (maybe even non-work-related) ways to practice because there is no other way to get better.
16. Bravery isn’t the absence of fear, it's feeling fear or discomfort and doing something anyway. Have hard conversations, try new things, take risks, own your mistakes and ask directly for what you want. The more comfortable you are being uncomfortable, the more possibilities you unlock. 
17. Change is constant, suffering is optional (hat tip: Doug Weaver).
18. You can negotiate just about anything, so long as you have two rational parties. If you don’t have two rational parties, you’ll have to find another solution.
19. There is always another bus. Don’t focus on the setback, deal you didn’t close, job you didn’t get, etc. for too long. Look for any lessons. Remember it’s not always about you. Throw yourself a tightly timed/finite pity party if you need it and then move forward.
20. If you don’t know what to do about something, take a break. Go for a walk, grab a bite, sleep on it, talk it through it with a trusted person or all of the above. Clarity will find you.
21. “Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.”
22. A great professional network is one that goes up, down, across and beyond your direct function.
23. Sometimes you just have to let things play out. One of my favorite people shared this important lesson in a memorable joke, the punchline being “Look, the czar could die, the dog could die, lots could happen … it’ll work itself out.”
24. Test, learn, iterate. And when you make mistakes, which you will because we all do, do your best to ensure they are new ones.
25. Whether you’re building a relationship or navigating a hard problem, a moment of genuine levity or humor can make things inordinately easier. 
26. Just breathe. You are enough, and you’ve got this. ■

In early February, U.S. House Republicans read the Constitution on the House floor following through on a Twitter pledge Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made after the GOP won control of the chamber last year. This dramatic recitation included the 45 words of the First Amendment — ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“

Yet within a matter of days, the new chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), made clear that he had threatened executives at DirecTV and AT&T, which retains a majority ownership stake in the satellite provider, to put Newsmax back on its scheduled lineup, “or else.”

Newsmax currently is not part of DirecTV’s menu of available channels, because, as explained in a company statement, “On multiple occasions, we [DirecTV] made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network, but ultimately Newsmax’s demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base.” For viewers, Newsmax still remains available through an even-wider video distribution platform, since nearly 300 Americans can continue to access it online for free through the Newsmax website.

This matter is a good-faith business dispute between two private companies, with no role to be played by chairman Comer. Nevertheless, Comer has made his threat to apply pressure to DirecTV and AT&T through the commencement of possible Congressional hearings. During a recent Newsmax interview with host John Bachman, he said, “So I think if anyone has ever watched the House Oversight Committee, any of our first three hearings, they have to ask themselves, do you really want to go in front of the House Oversight Committee? Because this is something that the 26 Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are very passionate about. We’re all huge fans of Newsmax.”  

Put simply, it is inconsistent with the Constitution to impose programming preferences through congressional strong-arming. This bedrock principle should be applicable for any type of programming that politicians of all political leanings might wish to mandate for a particular video distribution outlet. The potential involvement of the House Oversight Committee to undermine freedom of speech and of the press suggests that reading and honoring the First Amendment, instead of just reciting it aloud, would be the more meaningful course of action for House Republicans. ■

The world is undergoing a digital transformation and it is revolutionizing the media industry. In this age of information, producing high-quality content quickly is essential, and the pressure is on for media organizations to keep up with the pace of change.

One technology that is making waves in the industry is OpenAI's ChatGPT. Launched in November 2022, it has already amassed over 100 million users within just two months. Its advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities have made it a go-to technology for content creation, virtual assistants, and audience engagement. With Microsoft and Google investing billions in this technology, conversational AI is poised to become a game-changer for the future of the media industry.

ChatGPT is a prime example of a technology that follows the McLuhan tetrad law. This law is a framework for analyzing the impacts of technology on society. The tetrad law comprises four questions: What does the technology enhance? What does it make obsolete? What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced? And what does it reverse or flip into when pushed to its limits?

The first question is, what does ChatGPT enhance? ChatGPT is a powerful and efficient tool that can significantly enhance content creation for media organizations. Its advanced NLP technology allows it to analyze vast amounts of data and generate insights, trends and patterns that can be used to create engaging and high-quality content. ChatGPT can be informative in increasing the diversity of content by offering new perspectives and angles that may not have been considered. ChatGPT can speed up content creation by automating routine tasks like summarizing news articles and creating headlines, freeing up time for editors to focus on more important and complex tasks. These advantages can lead to increased productivity and efficiency, ultimately resulting in more engaging and relevant content for media organizations’ audiences, saving valuable time and resources. 

The second question is, what does ChatGPT make obsolete? ChatGPT has the potential to reduce the need for humans to perform translations and transcriptions from scratch by offering near real-time and personalized capabilities. By supporting 95 languages and leveraging signal-processing technology, ChatGPT enables faster and more efficient repurposing of content for global audiences. However, it's important to recognize that ChatGPT’s translations may not always accurately convey the intended meaning, particularly with complex or context-dependent texts. Therefore, ChatGPT is not a complete replacement for human translators and transcribers since they can offer unique insights and cultural nuances that are difficult to capture. 

The third question is, what does ChatGPT retrieve that was previously obsolesced? Through the use of natural language processing and context recognition, ChatGPT can retrieve and enhance discursive communication that traditional one-way communication has diminished. Its ability to simulate natural conversation encourages open-ended dialogue and prompts further discussion, fostering greater understanding and collaboration between “individuals.” Its power as a virtual assistant has the potential to create a positive impact on many aspects of society. Its ability to facilitate more effective and meaningful conversations is unparalleled, and it brings back the value of conversational communication.

The fourth question is, what does ChatGPT reverse or flip into when pushed to its limits? ChatGPT’s potential reversal when pushed too far is the production of homogeneous and unoriginal content. The lack of diversity and creativity in the content could result in homogeneous thinking and behavior in society, limiting cultural diversity. Media organizations that rely too heavily on ChatGPT to produce content are at risk of creating unengaging and monotonous content.

To prevent the potential danger of homogeneity, media organizations must find a way to balance ChatGPT’s efficiency with human creativity and expertise. Human writers can help enhance the content produced by ChatGPT, providing a nuanced understanding of culture and creativity that AI language models currently lack. This approach requires media organizations to acknowledge the limitations of AI language models and recognize the importance of human expertise in producing high-quality content.

The advantages of ChatGPT in the media industry are clear. With its ability to generate human-like text, media companies can create high-quality, diversified and interactive content quickly and efficiently. As the digital transformation continues, conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, can provide a range of benefits for media companies. We must adapt to stay relevant and competitive in a rapidly changing media landscape. ■

Chicken Little alarms were recently voiced in the U.S. Supreme Court that eliminating or narrowing the immunity from suit social media platforms enjoy for third-party postings under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would cause the sky to fall on their operations. Based on oral arguments held on February 21 and 22, the twin cases, Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, are likely to leave the blanket immunity for social media behemoths completely or virtually undisturbed. 

What’s wrong with this picture?

I am a small business owner of broadcast properties valued at a miniscule fraction of Google’s $1.16 trillion current capitalization or Twitter’s $41 billion. Yet I have no liability immunity for defamations broadcast on my programs or properties. Ditto for newspapers or other social-media competitors. We buy libel insurance. Why can’t Google and Twitter do the same? Why should these giants be given a leg up under Section 230? Isn’t that like giving Secretariat a head start over competitors at the Kentucky Derby in 1973?

Section 230 was passed in 1996 when social media was in its infancy. It was speculated that without legal immunity from defamation, invasion of privacy, or related tort claims for third-party postings on their digital platforms, social media companies would capsize into bankruptcy.  But no proof or logic was forthcoming. It was a postulate without proof either then or in the ensuing 27 years.

The relevant text reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

In contrast, newspapers, broadcasters, cable companies and satellite transmitters are subject to liability for content provided by third parties. But the law, liability insurance and the practicalities of litigation provide formidable defenses that adequately protect against adverse judgments or insolvency leaving a wide margin for free speech. None of these industries have become insolvent from tort liability.

The Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) and its progeny has erected virtually insurmountable First Amendment barriers to successfully suing public officials or public figures for defamation, invasion of privacy or similar speech. A plaintiff must shoulder the burden of proving, by clear and convincing evidence, that the defendant published a false statement of fact with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or not. Opinions are completely off-limits. And simple negligence in publishing a falsehood does not trigger liability. The defendant must be shown to have entertained a conscious awareness that the allegedly offensive publication contained a defamatory fact.

Moreover, defamation damages must be proven. But loss of reputation characteristically finds expression in business that never surfaces. Proving such a negative is commonly insurmountable.

Even more important, plaintiffs are ordinarily reluctant to sue to avoid providing a free and ruinous judicial platform for further distribution of the defamatory falsehood. Defamation suits are customarily costly and lengthy because proving the state of mind of the publisher and the reputation of the plaintiff is complex. A plaintiff’s entire life, warts, skeletons and all, are fair game in discovery. Unless you’re a saint, a defamation lawsuit may further ruin your brand. Thus, President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded his chief emissary Harry Hopkins to refrain from suing the Chicago Tribune for a story likening him to Rasputin, villainous courier to Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra. 

It is unsurprising that successful defamation or invasion of privacy suits against traditional media are extremely rare, like unicorns. Even a wealthy plaintiff like Sarah Palin was crushed in her defamation suit against The New York Times in Palin v. New York Times Company (2020).

Even before the constitutional protections of New York Times v. Sullivan and its progeny were inaugurated, tort liability judgments against traditional media were few and far between. Take investigative journalist Drew Pearson, whose “The Washington Merry-Go-Round” appeared daily from 1932 to 1969. He won 119 of 120 libel cases. None deterred his muckraking columns as chronicled in Donald Ritchey’s Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington.

Repeal of Section 230 would still leave social media platforms with the thick layers of constitutional protections enjoyed by traditional media that have safeguarded free speech, viewpoint diversity, and aggressive scrutiny of government. Even if the section was plausibly justified at birth 27 years ago because social media was embryonic, it is as obsolete today as the horse and buggy. Repeal will not cause the sky to fall. It would create an even playing field with social media giants still inheriting a competitive advantage from the twenty-seven years of liability immunity they have already enjoyed under section 230. I would wager that if the section were repealed, the impact on the stock prices of Twitter, Facebook and Google or their parent companies would be tiny. To believe otherwise is to believe Chicken Little. ■

Free ad-supported TV (FAST) is quickly moving from fringe to mainstream in the race to displace traditional cable with over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) services, and with good reason: consumers will not pay for all their TV content.

Today, FAST provides a familiar linear viewing experience for consumers while enabling rightsholders to more widely distribute content and unlock increased ad revenue opportunities. Many rightsholders utilize FAST as a cost-effective way to maximize audience reach by monetizing a relevant part of their catalog content. For advertisers, the growing streaming model is equally as enticing, providing them with a highly targeted way to reach viewers at scale.

FAST viewership hours more than doubled in 2021. Fueled by an influx of new premium content, growing audiences and fresh advertising dollars, the FAST market in the United States is poised to reach 216 million monthly active users in 2023, according to a study from nScreenMedia. 

\With 92% of U.S. households reachable via CTV open programmatic advertising, CTV is a scarce and coveted ad positioning for advertisers in the marketplace today. According to a 2022 CTV/OTT Advertiser Study from Advertiser Perceptions and Premion, 25% of respondents called CTV/OTT the most valuable media type in 2021, and 84% said the inventory is at least as valuable as primetime TV. As such, CTV ad spend is expected to increase by 22% in 2022.

It’s important that content owners and rightsholders be strategic in growing their FAST business so they can fully capitalize on the platform’s benefits and increase their value to advertisers. Here are three prongs to a successful FAST plan of action:

1.) Clearly define your content strategy. Be strategic about the content package you offer viewers on FAST services. Why this content, why in FAST? If you’re a sports league, for example, at this current moment it’s likely not smart to put your top-tier live games on FAST, but you can strategize about how to leverage catalog content to create a compelling consumer experience in a linear format.

2.) Promote discoverability. FAST channels don’t adhere to the “if you build it, they will come” ideology. Driving viewers to your FAST channel is a deal-making and marketing challenge. Be thoughtful about how you’re working with FAST service partners to get promotion and valuable placement on the screen and within their programming guide. You should also be leveraging your own channels, such as social media, to alert your audience about your FAST offerings. If you don’t focus on building an audience across your FAST ecosystem, you won’t.

3.) If you haven’t already, get involved now. FAST in its current state is reminiscent of the early days of YouTube; right now, there’s still tremendous opportunity to build your audience and establish your brand without competition from all angles. In the next 12 to 18 months, content owners and rightsholders should have a strategy to incorporate FAST into their media mix alongside social, licensing, and OTT plays. With seismic shifts expected in the FAST arena in the next 24 months, content owners joining the game too late could face limited FAST inventory and end up at the mercy of FAST platforms’ requests for content rather than driving their own channel placement and scheduling.

The Future of FAST

The TV ecosystem is undergoing unprecedented change. Will the future of TV consist of a combination of FAST services, a few bespoke SVOD/AVOD apps, and aggregation/bundled services? Perhaps. It’s likely to somewhat resemble what we have today, albeit in a more convenient content delivery method. As with any entertainment model transitioning from fringe to mainstream, it takes the big content owners and rights holders to come in and cement that model’s viability and positioning in the marketplace. We are seeing this happen very quickly with FAST.

As FAST offerings continue to increase their share of entertainment time, rights holders will flock to engage viewers with not just catalog material but, increasingly, fresh, premium content. It’s possible we’ll start to see top-tier content like live sports games on FAST channels, akin to a free-to-air partner today, in the not-so-distant future. For rightsholders and advertisers alike, FAST is ripe with opportunity and worth exploring as a key part of your direct-to-consumer business. ■

I found myself in a classic “chicken or the egg” TV industry debate at a recent business dinner. 

The conversation centered on whether the internet and connected TV led to innovations in television or whether the massive revenue increases from advanced TV advertising led to investments in innovations like CTV, streaming and a move toward digital-first distribution. 

How the bits make it from point A to point B on a screen doesn’t matter, whether it’s a set-top box, tablet or mobile phone. Under the hood, CTV is still just television that happens to be delivered over IP. And FAST? Besides a cool-sounding acronym, free ad-supported television is still the traditional broadcast model. I don’t pay to watch CBS broadcast TV free over the air — advertisers do! 

Somebody at the dinner table pushed this starry-eyed view: “You don’t need standards in CTV.” 

On the contrary. To build any kind of industry, you must eventually have standardization. Every growing sector has two choices: 1) you standardize and have an industry or 2) you don’t standardize, and you have a monopoly or, worse, an ad hoc conglomerate. 

I know about this cycle. My own company was one-half of an addressable advertising tech duopoly and we’ve now grown as much as we can in the U.S. We must now work to standardize and build an industry so that we can work with the other partners in the space to grow it. That’s the only way forward.  

The entire television industry is based on this classic business arc. RCA was once an early example of vertical integration, owning content creation via NBC, transmission through station-group ownership and manufacturing, making cameras and television sets. When the move to color was happening, the Federal Communications Commission held a competition and RCA’s NTSC lost to the Color Wheel developed and backed by CBS. When RCA threatened to go its own way due to its market dominance, the FCC reversed course and adopted NTSC as the “standard.” 

Program-guide software in cable television is another example. The guide technology was held by a single company that charged exorbitant fees and became a roadblock to new technologies that cable operators wanted to deploy. The solution? A major cable operator invested heavily in developing its own hardware platform and software stack, effectively putting the guide company out of business and commoditizing the set-top box industry at the same time.  Another monopoly tumbled. 

Free markets abhor monopolies. They’ll put up with them for a little while but eventually everybody hates paying the freight because monopolies can charge whatever they want and stifle innovation. At some point, someone will break in and disrupt your model just to steal market share because monopolies are unstable.  

CTV and FAST may be today’s dangling shiny objects to many in the industry but they did not magically appear overnight. They both followed the classic monopoly-to-standardization pattern that started with the internet’s birth in the ’60s. The internet was a Defense Department and university monopoly until the creation of the Ethernet protocol and HTML as its everyday language, standards that allowed everyone to participate, not just a privileged few.  

The tech monoliths have created their own monopolies by building impenetrable silos for advertisers, but even those are slowly starting to crumble.  

Google’s ad monopoly started being chipped away the second the IAB and major advertisers banded together to create header bidding and threw pebbles into the Google Ad Manager gears. Suddenly, the playing field was leveled, and Google was forced to work with companies they never had to before, pushing it toward transparency and universal standards. 

Meta’s time is certainly going to come. It offers a platform to create campaigns that can exist only on its own network and nowhere else.  

Still, marketers believe they have to spend money with them. There are too many users there and they can’t afford to ignore them. 

In the short term, Facebook will continue to attract advertising dollars But in the long run, like many other content companies, its walled strategy will become a loser and it will have to conform with standards just like Google.  

The tide is turning against Facebook on two fronts:  Advertisers are tiring of making endless calls to multiple ad tech ecosystems to reach their desired audiences, especially when they want to know exactly what they are getting in return for their investment and added work.  

At the same time, Facebook’s prime demographic is moving out of the age group that advertisers really care about, pushing the company into an identity crisis, even trying to make themselves look like TikTok. Parent company Meta’s stock price spent much of 2022 beaten down on weak earnings, and their metaverse strategy is looking like a very expensive albatross. 

We may be seeing the writing on the wall that being a monopoly forever is not in the cards for many technology-driven brands, including those in television. 

Make no mistake: CTV is here to stay and there are lucrative businesses to be built around it. They may seem sexy as the new shiny tech gadgets. Taking pages from the Google and Facebook playbook, they’ve built up many silos and we have seen how those monopoly cycles eventually fail. Expect chaos in the short term as competing technologies ultimately create a stable business ecosystem. 

However, the hockey stick of growth will not come for CTV until everything works the same way when standards are in place, even if it is “the Wild West of the internet.” ■ 

When the World Cup had its memorable run in Qatar, I enjoyed watching the matches like everyone else. But honestly, I was much more focused on the technical aspects of the viewing experience for fans worldwide. That’s because I was leading the product management team at a streaming analytics technology company that works with FIFA and with broadcast companies such as Disney, NBCUniversal and Univision and over-the-top platforms like Hulu. The same will be true this Sunday for Super Bowl LVII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. 

Given the magnitude of the Super Bowl and the 11.2 million households that streamed the game last year instead of watching it on traditional broadcast or cable TV, let’s take this opportunity to acknowledge how far live streaming has come, especially for sports. Back in 2000, Fox experimented with an industry first, attempting to “webcast” — as it was called at the time — a college football game between Nebraska and San Jose State. It was a buffering nightmare, which is understandable for an era when households used low-bandwidth dialup modems to connect to the internet. Today, our industry can be proud of how far the streaming experience has advanced in the 20-plus years since then. 

During the World Cup final, we saw a peak number of nearly 22 million concurrent viewing sessions, which more than doubled the 9 million that watched via the internet four years earlier. These numbers represent the tremendous pressure events of this magnitude place on publishers to deliver a seamless viewing experience. Not to mention that NFL games were live-streamed as the World Cup took place, adding complexity to back-end planning for viewer surges that could cause screens to buffer or pixelate. Any sports fan will know that missing even a small part of the action because of a technical glitch is tremendously irritating.

Such an experience — if it had occurred — would’ve been unacceptable during the World Cup. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the publishers of the 2022 soccer extravaganza met or exceeded customers’ expectations.  

Super Bowl LVII is also being approached with a customer-centric mindset. Here’s an educational, behind-the-scenes look at how it’s technologically possible to live stream the Big Game and other sporting events to millions of people across multiple device types and models, operating systems, broadcast networks and content delivery networks (CDNs). 

Forecasting Ebbs and Flows (and Surges)

The athletes participating in the Super Bowl have been getting ready for this game for months. It takes a similar commitment and level of preparation to live stream the game to millions of people, ensuring every single one gets the excellent fan experience they expect. Given the complexity and just one chance to get it right, it’s mission-critical to anticipate the unexpected ways things can go off course with a live video stream.

The World Cup spanned 28 days and entailed 20-plus streaming companies. It involved more than six months of planning for expected peak concurrent plays (PCP) and preparing contingencies for anything that could disrupt the viewer experience. Because we’ve been able to leverage those learnings and the work of more than a decade powering the world’s most prestigious live sporting events, our meticulous Super Bowl LVII preparations have been more streamlined, taking just two months.  

The ability to effectively plan for unpredictable events starts with historical data, mainly the Super Bowl streaming viewer data from past years. Data is also incorporated from the recent World Cup. which is a helpful baseline for the Super Bowl. Even though the Big Game is more of a North American phenomenon, they are both global events with high concurrent view rates. Forecasters can ensure they model enough resources to handle the Super Bowl's traffic surges thanks to what they learned from the World Cup.

Streaming partners also input their recent historical traffic data to bolster the modeling. Then, it’s essential to factor in typical internet usage overall during the Super Bowl and how that might impact people’s ability to have the viewing experience they expect.  

Potential surges can be challenging to predict, but this intelligence is essential given that viewership ebbs and flows during a live event. For example, not everyone will begin watching right at the coin flip on Sunday. Several minutes or more may elapse before the peak number of concurrent viewers (PCV) is reached. At halftime, viewership can shift up or down dramatically as people pause or close their player. As the real-time, first-party data comes in from the streaming platforms and our sensors — integrated into each platform’s video player or app — this intelligence informs needed adjustments on the fly to improve the viewing experience. For instance, despite having the best traffic calculations available during the World Cup, we saw ad traffic spike unexpectedly during halftime on a day with relatively low overall traffic. So, we reverted to manual scaling capacity and continued this before each game for the rest of the World Cup. That level of preparation paid dividends during the final match, which pushed many of our subsystems to their limit. We had predicted traffic for the match would be between 18 million and 19 million. In the end, there were almost 22 million viewers! 

These are the types of situations that professionals behind the scenes will be ready to handle this Sunday, improving the Big Game viewing experience in real time. Speed is crucial. If there is buffering or pixelation that will create bad viewer experiences, the broadcaster and its partners have to know about it instantly and fix it quickly. If that vital data does not flow in real time, phone calls are made. It takes a team behind the scenes to keep the viewing experience going without a major hitch.

Validating via Rigorous Testing 

 Long before the game begins, a staggering amount of technology infrastructure needs to be implemented to support a streaming event at the scale of a Super Bowl. Nailing the technology is part art and part science.  

Yet, it’s not enough to build forecasts and fortify infrastructure for live-streaming gigantic media events. Everything must be validated through rigorous testing in environments that simulate the expected real-world conditions. In other words, getting ready to stream the Super Bowl is a data and technology game that involves engineering know-how and technical support from teams that monitor and evaluate critical systems and dashboards well before the national anthem and kickoff. 

Leaving No Stone Unturned 

This industry knows from previous live events that there is no room for error. If an issue or incident occurs, viewers might miss the most exciting moment of the Super Bowl, which will lead to public outcry, switching channels, and even churn. So, leaving no stone unturned ensures that any issue is anticipated and addressed before it becomes apparent to viewers. While fans everywhere enjoy the event, a dedicated team puts weeks of preparation into practice, making certain that nothing comes between the viewers and their enjoyment of every second of the year's biggest game. 

Super Bowl Sunday is practically a national holiday. The millions of fans who take it in over an internet-based channel will see the product of the media and entertainment industry’s advancements over the last two decades and the painstaking work of a dedicated technology plus support team in real time. While the complexity of streaming media continues to grow, what doesn’t change is the massive commitment formidable media and technology companies put forth to get the event right for viewers. And now you, too, will know what happens behind the scenes to make those expectations a reality. ■

Imagine if the family cars of 16 million American households suddenly vanished — transportation to work, school, doctors and stores suddenly cut off. For many, such a devastating loss would jeopardize their employment, education, healthcare and everyday family needs. 

Now imagine if home broadband for 16 million American households enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) abruptly disappeared: Loss of an internet connection would have many of the same repercussions. If our nation’s next federal budget doesn’t include dollars to extend the ACP, this modern-day nightmare could become reality for millions of Americans as soon as next year.

The Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA) is investing $42.5 billion toward broadband infrastructure to help people in every corner of America maintain high-speed internet at home. This is smart policy, as the past three years clearly demonstrated the criticality of internet access in modern American life.

The IIJA passed the Senate by a resounding 69-30 vote. Broadband availability is the all-too-rare policy issue backed by both progressives and conservatives, and logically so. Progressives note the consistent overlap between digital divides and social divides, with internet have-nots more frequently among communities of color or more vulnerable populations. Conservatives recognize that high-speed internet is critical to education and employment and that people who can work and children who can learn contribute more to, and need less from, the government in their lifetimes.

 But broadband affordability is an even bigger issue than availability.

Rural Americans, in particular, benefit from financial assistance that the ACP provides. In fact, the states with the highest program participation rates are red and rural, and two of the four states that have broken the million mark in total number of households enrolled in the ACP are Republican-led. Struggling farmers need broadband just as much as striving students in the inner city.

 A 2019 study estimated that better adoption of online tools and digital services by businesses outside metropolitan areas could create 360,000 new full-time jobs in rural areas and add more than $140 billion to the U.S. economy over the subsequent three years. Permanently solving the broadband affordability challenge, in addition to closing the availability gaps, would ensure that 30 million rural citizens and thousands of small businesses have access to the network that unleashes innovation in education, retail, entertainment, and many other industries.

What’s more, the Affordable Connectivity Program enables participants to shop among broadband providers, which increases competition in the marketplace. This competitive pressure keeps pricing in check and benefits consumers by significantly expanding their provider and plan choices. Rather than a one-size-fits-all plan, these families in need can select the level of service that best suits their needs, pushing providers to keep their offerings competitive across the board.

America can expect a good return on its investment to make broadband affordable for every household. Research shows a high correlation between increased broadband penetration and GDP growth, with some studies even suggesting a causal relationship. The World Bank estimated that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration can lead to a 1.2% jump in real per capita GDP growth in developed economies.

In addition to economic gains, the social benefits of home broadband are immeasurable. Today, meaningful participation in society depends on being connected. From doing homework to seeing pictures of friends and family, the value of ensuring that all Americans can afford broadband can’t be overstated.

President Joe Biden should include a fully funded Affordable Connectivity Program in the budget that he’ll soon submit to Congress, and Republicans should quickly embrace this item, as the data confirms that their constituents are reaping the benefits of broadband. Rather than creating a nightmare for millions of people chasing the American dream, our leaders can help them achieve it. ■

As chairman and CEO of the Chamber of the Americas, I proudly support our organization’s mission to facilitate trade and investment that strengthens local economies and fosters a spirit of harmony, social and economic justice in the international community, creating a society for the greater good of all humanity. But none of this is possible without well-informed citizens.

Over the past two decades, there have been rapid changes in the way we get our news. From the increased social media presence to the closing of local newspapers across the country, the preservation of local news sources is imperative. Now more than ever, the future of local broadcast journalism depends on new strategies and investments to keep the industry functional and afloat.

Standard General’s pending acquisition of Tegna broadcast stations will give the industry exactly the boost it needs. Standard General has outlined a vision for the future of local news driven by its investment and modernization strategy in broadcast stations across the county. Standard General’s experienced leadership team has pledged to employ a decentralized approach to station management and allow each station manager to tailor news programming to best serve the community it covers. 

My work with the Hispanic community across the country and abroad has given me a front-row seat to the changing demographics of our society. Yet despite these changes, the broadcast industry is still lacking diverse representation at senior levels of leadership. Standard General’s CEO, Soo Kim, is a well-respected minority business leader who is committed to creating opportunities for minority communities and women leaders. 

Mr. Kim, a Korean immigrant and now a proud Asian-American, is a living example of the American dream. His commitment to enhancing diversity in broadcast news and media generally is absolute and a transformation the industry must make to stay relevant with minority consumers. Minority newsrooms, reporters, and owners will not only attract more diverse viewers, but also better ensure local news is more reflective of the increasingly diverse U.S. population and the needs of their local communities.

In 2020, Hispanics were the largest U.S. ethnic minority, making up 18.7% of the general population, but diversity in the media has failed to keep pace and evolve as America’s demographics rapidly diversify. Without adequate representation, both in newsrooms and television boardrooms, minority Americans are denied access to trusted journalism that is relevant to their lives and individual situations and coverage that is meaningful to them. And that’s a lot of people, as minorities of all kinds, but especially Hispanics, play an ever larger role in the U.S. society and economy.

Progress has been made since the early days of television, when broadcast journalists were almost exclusively white men, but minorities still don’t have full participation in television news. A 2022 study from Syracuse University estimated a total U.S. minority population of just under 40%, but found that minorities made up only 25.5% of the television news workforce. Standard General’s commitment to newsroom diversity can be a strong force for change at the Tegna stations. 

As I have dedicated my career to supporting minorities in business, I am proud to support minority leaders like Mr. Kim playing a larger role in an industry that is so important to the future of our communities. 

I urge the Federal Communications Commission to stand up for diversity in media and approve this transaction. It’s time to send a signal to minority media investors that times have changed and American media needs your passion, new ideas, and diverse perspectives to lead it into the future. ■

What will people be talking about and adjusting to throughout the year? 

The new year is ushering in fresh opportunities and carryover challenges in the media landscape. Many are continued trends from the past couple of years around data privacy and measurement. Others are newer trends as viewership changes continue to shift and more emphasis is put on profitability for media companies. Here are some expectations we see on the near horizon: 

Measurement and Data Privacy Shifts: As rules and regulations around consumer data privacy continue to grow, advertisers will continue to explore alternatives to cookie-based and multi-touch attribution (MTA) solutions for targeting, measurement and attribution, including data clean rooms, media mix modeling and geographic-based media experimentation. Additional alternatives will include survey and zero-party data (data a user shares intentionally with a company). 

Media mix modeling is the highest in demand right now in terms of emerging alternatives followed by experimentation. Clean rooms and zero-party data are supplemental at this point. 

The media industry, unfortunately, remains no closer to establishing standards of measurement and attribution. As far as digital tracking, targeting and measurement, everyone is still very cookie-dependent and will remain so until forced to do something else. These solutions will be additive to the measurement and data-tracking arsenal. As long as cookies are viable, cookies will remain the preferred tracking, measurement and targeting option.

Media Consumption Continues to Shift to Influencer-Based Content: Media consumption continues to shift to growth and value in the creator economy. YouTube, TikTok, and Meta have given independent creators a platform to develop large and loyal audiences that brands can connect with. TikTok, especially, will grow exponentially compared to the other “legacy” digital platforms, according to findings in the EMarketer Influencer Marketing 2022 report.

Media Consolidation Among Streaming Platforms: Some companies lack the scale to compete in streaming (AMC, Paramount, etc.,) as the new streaming bundles from the likes of The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery begin to look a lot more like siloed cable-TV bundles. But pressure is on the big players as well with an increased focus on profitability. A swift change in leadership atop Disney at the end of last year put share price in the spotlight as well as weaknesses in Disney’s various businesses — such as streaming platform Disney Plus likely not becoming profitable until 2024.  Given the challenges in continued growth and pressure on profitability, streamers will look for ways to cut costs or find new areas for growth, which could include further consolidation (buying other streaming services) and bundling.

Sports Rights Deals: A lot will happen in terms of sports rights deals in 2023 as more value is put on individual league deals, exclusive deals like “NFL Sunday Ticket” and the future of the regional sports networks given their current ties to limited cable TV bundles. Players like Apple, Google and Amazon have the ability to use their cash to make large jumps in the streaming space very quickly by purchasing streaming sports rights deals, as Google just did with NFL Sunday Ticket for YouTube. There is also talk of the sports leagues themselves (Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League in particular) buying back some of the sports rights deals to distribute through their own streaming services. 

Audience Measurement with Alternative Currencies: Now approaching the one-year mark in which many agencies and advertisers began dipping a toe in the water of alternative currencies to Nielsen (iSpot TV, VideoAmp, and Comscore primarily), it remains to be seen how advertisers will react to the multiple tools available for measurement of cross-screen TV and video campaigns. The most likely scenario is that each network group will begin to provide preferred deals to advertisers, as we have already seen with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery,  while Nielsen continues to remain the most preferred currency across partners.

Social Trends with a Focus on AI and Privacy: Twitter continues to shed advertisers and users as it struggles with brand safety, content moderation, and executive departures following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. TikTok continues to increase its share of video time spent, providing consumers with an effective quick hit of entertainment dopamine. Meanwhile, a bill to ban the platform is gaining steam in Congress. 

Will TikTok eat our brains in 2023? Is the metaverse a bucket of hogwash? Those questions will fade into the background as more people adopt the next generation of social media with ChatGPT and the real question will become, what do the new advancements in AI mean for how machines will play a role in our daily lives? ▪️

After the chaotic process that led to the 15th-round election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, there is much talk about how much power he needed to give up in order to achieve his narrow-majority victory. But even with the new rule changes for the 118th Congress — such as allowing for a single member to make a motion to vacate, triggering a vote on retaining the Speaker — there is one clear power that Speaker McCarthy has not forfeited. That’s the power to let C-SPAN have unrestricted camera access to House proceedings, as it did during the dramatic events leading up to the final vote tally.

American viewers of all political stripes were riveted by seeing, for the first time ever, how complicated the back-and-forth machinations of our legislators can be. Who will forget the live images of Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, being forcibly restrained from attacking Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who refused during the 14th round a vote change to enable Kevin McCarthy to cross the finish line? Or seeing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) as she waved around her smartphone with the incoming initials DT to indicate that former President Donald Trump was trying to reach Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) in order to bring him into the pro-Kevin fold?

Since it began operating on cable television systems nationwide in 1979, C-SPAN has provided live coverage of House sessions. But ever since then, the Speaker has exercised a power provided in that chamber’s rules which restricts what the cameras can actually show to viewers. Given that many legislative activities involve set speeches to only a handful in attendance, viewers are not allowed to see the sparse audience or the reactions of individual members.

It is reality TV in genre, but not in reality itself. The Speaker traditionally has exercised a tight level of audio and visual control that surely will seem anachronistic now that everyone has been able to get a glimpse at the inner workings of a legislative process often described as sausage making.

Maintaining this new level of transparency seems to have support from Speaker McCarthy’s most fervent supporters, too. In his nominating speech for McCarthy on the House floor, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) succinctly conveyed the larger import of a television policy that would enable voters to see more, even if it lacked the purpose or polish of a Congressional press release. “Sure, it looks messy, but democracy is messy. Democracy is messy! Democracy is messy by design. By design! And that’s a feature, not a bug of our system. We air it all out in the open for the American people to see because, at the end of the day, the president's not in charge, the Supreme Court's not in charge and the Speaker of the House's not even in charge; the American people are in charge.”

With the gavel now finally in Kevin McCarthy’s hands, he can make a firm imprint as Speaker by relaxing just when and how widely C-SPAN’s cameras can roam. And I suspect that if public opinion is solicited about making such a move, it would overwhelmingly support this new level of civic openness.

Put simply, there is no rational reason to put this proverbial genie back in the bottle. As comedian Jon Stewart noted in a pithy Tweet, “This is the best season of cspan [sic] … ever.” The viewers have spoken, and Speaker McCarthy would be well-advised to make sure that our screens remain in living color instead of with a static test pattern once more. ■

Despite concerns over the global economic outlook, demand for quality CTV inventory has never been higher, and advertisers are eager to tap into greater flexibility when it comes to purchasing this highly coveted inventory. However, even with advertisers’ and publishers’ desire to harness the benefits and revenue inherent in programmatic CTV buying, the pace of adoption hasn’t kept pace with the levels of enthusiasm.

So what’s needed to take programmatic CTV buying and revenue to the next level? The answer is a simple one: transparency. Fortunately, the technology needed to drive greater transparency in CTV buying is already available in the form of content object data signals. Let’s talk about why these signals are so important and how they’re going to change the trajectory of programmatic CTV adoption for advertisers and publishers alike.

What Are Content Object Data Signals?

When advertisers buy inventory on linear TV, they know precisely where it will appear -- the network, show, ad slot, genre and rating of the content, you name it. This transparency enables complete confidence in the brand safety of content, and it’s one of the primary reasons linear TV spend has remained so strong, despite heavy shifts in viewership to streaming channels.

So what about programmatic CTV? How do we bring this level of transparency into this fast-growing space? That’s where content object data signals come in. Content objects are information that publishers can pass through the bidstream to give advertisers valuable information on the inventory they’re buying. These signals can include network, show, genre, ratings and other key pieces of information that allow advertisers to know precisely where their ads will be running.

Content objects are a vital tool that publishers and advertisers can use to enhance contextual targeting, and buyers are able to leverage the information gleaned from content object signals for better attribution and optimization. In other words, they’re the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to bringing the incredibly desirable transparency of linear into the programmatic CTV space. So why isn’t the use of content objects ubiquitous?

Barriers to Content Object Data Signal Adoption

One of the main reasons content object signals aren’t pervasive in programmatic CTV buying today is a simple lack of awareness. In fact, a recent study found only about half of U.S. and U.K. advertisers are familiar with content object signals and use them to purchase CTV and OTT video ad inventory. 

In terms of inventory, there are also simply not enough publishers passing these valuable insights into the bidstream yet. This is more than a lack of awareness of the option to do so. Rather, some publishers harbor the misconception that passing content object signals into the bidstream will lead to too much advertiser cherry-picking on inventory and, thus, a lack of scale. But indeed, research shows quite the opposite: 62% of U.S. brands and 82% of UK brands say they would increase their spend with partners that provide data such as content object signals, and a majority of advertisers say they are willing to pay a premium for the transparency that content object signals afford them.

Benefits of Greater Transparency in Programmatic CTV

Overall, there’s a tremendous amount of value to be unlocked within the programmatic CTV space, for buyers and publishers alike, and content object data signals hold the key. These include the following:

Scale. Many of today’s advertisers feel that they need to buy with big-name publishers if they want to get brand-safe inventory in the CTV space, but that’s simply not the case. By passing inventory details via content object signals, small and mid-size publishers will open up a tremendous amount of inventory to advertisers that wouldn’t have otherwise considered such purchases (and instead favored direct, hard-to-scale deals with publishers).

Flexibility. Programmatic CTV buying enables advertisers to buy the inventory they want, when they want it, and at the price they want. At present, a lot of brands and agencies that desire this flexibility are abstaining from programmatic CTV due to a perceived lack of transparency and brand safety. By removing these perceived dangers, publishers will be able to welcome a whole slew of new, eager brands into the CTV buying fold.

Continuity across buys. Content object signals enable CTV buys to harness the strengths of both the linear and digital worlds -- rich content information on one side and strong impression-level data on the other. In doing so, programmatic CTV can help campaigns that span linear TV and digital video become more cohesive across channels.

With greater transparency comes greater adoption. In this regard, content object signals hold the key to unlocking the tremendous advertising value and revenue potential from programmatic CTV that advertisers and publishers have been long awaiting. ■

Advertisers are betting bigger on video for 2023, and they’re raising their expectations with it. To meet them, and to keep advertisers on track, networks and publishers need to raise their sales games.

Specifically, 60% of video advertisers plan to increase their video spending, at a median increase of 20%. While linear TV and social video have captured advertisers’ fascination over the past few years, their 2023 focus will be more on CTV and digital video. Agencies are particularly bullish on the importance of CTV. They want the flexibility and precision that CTV enables, and they see it as less expensive than scaling linear TV investments.

That said, advertisers' expectations are rising as their views on effectiveness change. Reach isn't enough anymore. They want to build specific audiences that serve their brand and commerce goals. More frequency isn't better anymore. They want to be in shorter pods with clear competitive separation, and caps on how often the same people get their commercial messages in any given period.

At the same time, advertisers want innovation to make their brands stand out. They want to see how their specific audiences are building across screens, and of course they want stronger proof that people (not bots) are watching the screens.

The stakes on all this rise as audiences crisscross publishers' channels and products, while advertisers hedge budgets against macroeconomic uncertainty.

As tempting as it is to (over)react to consumers' shifts in media habits, advertisers need to stay grounded. They need to build a commercial narrative true to the brand that engages consumers and enhances their viewing experiences.

To do it, they need video networks and publishers to show them how to use the media, not just buy it. Salespeople need to be Sherpas through the complexity of audience changes, innovative ad products, content standards and performance metrics.

That means sales must reorient from about us to about you and develop new fluencies, starting with brand and business strategy. Salespeople need to know more about the actual KPIs of clients' businesses -- where they need to score and how they're counting points -- that inform their media choices. Then they can think upstream to recommend solutions.

Thinking upstream has traditionally been a requirement for challenger media. TV didn't need to go there, digital video did. Now all video does. That means identifying specific audience opportunities of strategic importance and recommending paths to nurture these viewers with a variety of content and interactions, rather than simply target impressions with reach and frequency levels. And it means selling examples from the advertiser's category, how others have found success across the marketing funnel with a combination of ad products.

At a time when finance is pushing marketing into a corner, video sellers have a key role in keeping advertising on full for brands. Trusted media brands will be the ones that explain, protect, and support. While automation is a selling point for advertising flexibility, increasingly advertisers need to get someone on the phone now. As marketers count on video advertising to do more heavy lifting across the marketing funnel, and raise their performance expectations, they'll turn first to the partners they trust to deliver on demand and on strategy. ■

When it comes to news, we find ourselves living in a world with access to more and more information, but we are somehow less informed. Instead of being provided facts, we increasingly are told how to think about something — many times not even knowing what that something really is. On many platforms, the line between news and opinion has become so blurred.

The good news is that in the midst of all of this confusion, local television finds itself holding a unique and enviable position as the trusted source of information — one that still believes in telling the story the way I learned to tell it in journalism school many years ago: who, what, when, where, why and how.

Following Standard General’s acquisition of Tegna, it will be my privilege to serve as CEO and lead a terrific group of dedicated broadcast and digital employees. Under our leadership, Tegna will be the nation’s largest minority-owned and woman-led broadcasting group. But more than that, through continued hard-hitting, objective local journalism — done the right way — we will continue to ask the tough questions and provide the public the information they need.

Stations’ Key Advantages

Through my leadership of Media General and Young Broadcasting, I have 30-plus years of experience working with newsrooms in all types of markets, both large and small. Regardless of the size of the market, each of these local broadcast stations have possessed a number of key advantages.

First, they were transparent and accountable to the communities they served. Local broadcasters build trust with viewers through consistent, dependable information and honest and direct reporting. This stands in stark contrast to the behavior of anonymous purveyors of “news” information on the internet.

Second, they were responsive to the old maxim that “all news is local” — that it must relate to the daily needs of viewers, who care not only about hometown sports and weather but also about their schools, the accountability of government officials and the safety of their neighborhoods.

Third, their viewers still inherently trust local journalists. This is not to ever be taken for granted, however, as a station’s reputation is tested each day, and we are only as good as our last story.

Fourth, broadcasters have worked hard to protect the distribution of their valuable content, which is essential to funding strong local newsrooms. This is in sharp contrast to the reality of regional newspapers, which were late to the table in protecting the distribution of their content.  As a result of this and other missed opportunities, many newspapers find themselves in a tragic cycle of cuts to news operations as they continue to shrink in size, substance and circulation – in large part due to cuts to news operations.  Our world is very different from that of newspapers.

Now is the time to take advantage of our unique position and run with it. To be successful, we need to deliver our local content to viewers and users on their terms. This requires us to be where they are. Modern newsrooms need to be nimble, and outdated divisions (broadcast vs. digital) in the newsroom will not work. Each station needs its newsroom personnel to work together as one newsroom to push its content on multiple platforms.

This approach allows us to reach and serve all of our community, including those who may only access content on a phone. Expanded distribution also supports an inclusive environment that welcomes a diversity of voices.

Keeping Watch on Local Government

We as broadcasters also need to invest in efforts to protect journalism and access to information. Newspapers once led this charge, but the responsibility has increasingly fallen on local broadcasters and other media to support access cases and reporters’ rights. In an age of virtual meetings and electronic communication, we know less and less about what is happening with our local governments. We need to protect our journalists’ rights to access.

Standard General and I are ready to build on the successes at Tegna through prioritizing needed investments in news and, most importantly, people. We believe this is essential to expanding local news content and safeguarding our communities’ access to objective and reliable news.

All broadcasters should see these efforts as being as essential as paying the power bill. If we as broadcasters fail, then our viewers will be left in the dark. ■

There's been plenty of industry buzz around the addressable TV advertising opportunity in recent years, but it has been challenging for marketers to feel like they've cracked the code on leveraging addressable within their broader efforts. That's because there's still a good deal of complexity to navigate, with major hurdles in first defining addressability, actually delivering scaled addressable advertising, and finally, in measuring success. This is manifesting in poor results, at a high price.

If you’re a brand or agency looking to maximize ROI within the premium addressable TV channel, there are a few fundamental planning considerations that can go a long way in terms of overcoming challenges and improving results. Here’s an overview of where to start.

Plan for Scale

The advanced planning required to achieve scale in addressable linear or CTV may be new to marketers who typically focus on digital campaigns. Two planning requirements for success include understanding scale limitations and solutions, as well as how your partners can support achieving your goals.

Limitations to scale often start with inventory and programming. On the digital media front, if an audience segment is underdelivering, the campaign will simply begin serving the next best segment. Marketers should be prepared to supplement audiences on the CTV and addressable linear side to achieve scale.

Optimize spend by deploying the same audience and message across digital, CTV and addressable linear campaigns. There is a good chance you will need to supplement your audiences with video campaigns to achieve the scale necessary to drive outcomes. Keep in mind as you shift between channels, the same audience may find different match rates, delivering incremental scale in one channel over another. 

It's important to be proactive and understand where audiences will be running from a network and distribution standpoint to ensure a campaign is set up for success prior to launch. Unfortunately, many campaigns stumble off the bat because this audience supplementation step is skipped, and campaigns subsequently end up drastically underdelivering.

Know Thy Partners

The TV partner landscape is deep and wide. It can be hard to tell who does what, and how well they do it. Understanding partner capabilities and resources will further support achieving scale and overall campaign success.

First look at platform partners. Several have cross-channel planning capabilities that assess inventory and delivery prior to running campaigns, giving advertisers an accurate sense of scale during the planning process, altogether enabling an optimized channel mix with scale on delivery.

Additional consideration is required for distribution partners in CTV and addressable linear. Do they have access to the right inventory needed to run an impactful campaign? Are their sources diverse enough to drive incremental reach? All the planning in the world won’t matter if the distribution partner can't deliver the inventory.

Focus on Households, Not Individuals

The promise of one-to-one audience targeting is an attractive one, but it might misdirect marketers to focus on the individual level in this particular channel. When considering CTV and addressable linear campaigns, this level of data won’t take advertisers very far. Brands and agencies need to work with data partners with active household-level data that can scale across CTV and addressable linear channels. By leveraging household-level data, marketers can achieve greater scale and unlock the opportunity to reach all members and devices within a household, rather than limiting their targeting to a single device or user experience.

When targeting at the household level, one additional element to keep in mind is context. With a possibly larger range of consumers in a household, from age, to gender, to interests, ensuring targeting is paired with relevant programming can help you ensure the right viewers in the house are seeing your message.

Understand the Reality of Success Metrics

When it comes to addressable TV, many marketers are challenged to identify the right success metrics for their campaigns. Should they be applying TV standards to these buys? Or digital ones? The simple reality is that, despite the increasingly digital nature of TV, these addressable TV opportunities are still top of funnel. Marketers should be thinking in terms of awareness and impressions, not just clicks.

Creative should be designed to influence viewers and move them down the funnel as a part of a larger omnichannel effort. As tempting as it can be, providing a 20 percent off QR coupon to viewers during a 30-second ad just doesn't work very well. It's best for advertisers to play to TV's strengths when planning their CTV and addressable linear campaigns.

Look at Omnichannel Performance To Assess the Validity of Audiences

That said, even though TV best serves brands at the top of the funnel, marketers shouldn’t fail to assess the impact of their efforts in a larger omnichannel capacity. This is particularly important when it comes to evaluating the success of audiences being targeted across multiple channels. 

Lower-funnel channels like digital display and social media lend themselves to complementing the household-level data with individual-level data that can be mapped back to the original exposure at the household level. Marketers should pay attention to lower-funnel metrics and understand who is converting as a result of omnichannel efforts that include CTV and addressable linear.

Measurement may become more complex, requiring advertisers to assess channels and audiences separately, and as a whole. This will help gauge incrementality as well as refine strategy. Future audiences can be modeled after the best-performing channels and segments.

The addressable TV opportunity for brands and agencies is a growing one, but properly leveraging this opportunity requires a hybrid playbook and a little added planning and evaluation. By taking the above five factors into account, marketers can improve their omnichannel results and ultimately bolster the long-term strategy and value of CTV and addressable linear within their media mixes. ■

The 2022 hurricane season comes to an official close today, with late-season Hurricanes Ian and Nicole unleashing devastating and deadly storms that wreaked havoc across the Southeast.   

The loss of life and destruction of personal property was widespread. But so were the countless inspiring human-interest stories amid the tragedy. As always, when hardship hit the U.S., the best in our fellow citizens shined through.     

Traditional first responders — police, fire, National Guard, EMTs, doctors and nurses — rose to the occasion for the victims of Ian and Nicole and their work continues today. These heroes put the safety and well-being of the community ahead of everything else, including their own families. These brave and selfless men and women not only deserve our recognition, but they also command our respect.

Another critically important group that unites our communities during crises, including natural disasters such as Ian and Nicole, are local television and radio broadcasters. In the cases of Ian and Nicole, it was the local radio and television broadcasters in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina who were there for their communities as the storms unleashed their fury. 

When the residents of these states needed credible information on Ian and Nicole, local broadcasters provided it in a way no one-person blog, social media site or non-local media entity or search engine could ever accomplish. The advanced weather technology and early-warning systems provided by local broadcasters enabled millions of residents to find safe havens, saving lives in the process. Only local broadcasters and local meteorologists were able to talk to the specific neighborhoods and towns in the path of both storms, allowing people to move to safer ground and find lodging, food and other provisions.  

Local broadcasters were at the forefront to educate, inform, comfort, console and, most importantly, protect the public before, during and after Ian and Nicole hit. Their broadcast signals were the epicenter of crucial news and information for millions of people. When their communities needed them most, local broadcasters responded with multilingual, commercial-free, and around-the-clock coverage on their linear, digital, streaming and social media platforms.

Local broadcasts surpassed anything the national media could provide because these storms were, in essence, local stories. Trusted television and radio brands and personalities were what people needed, and the local broadcasters of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina were there for them at every turn. Perhaps most importantly, local broadcasters live in the markets they serve and are still there serving their communities long after the cable news networks leave town. As always, local broadcasters are there for their communities for the short and long haul.

It’s inevitable that we will face future natural (and unnatural) disasters. Wherever and whenever they might happen, local television and radio broadcasters will be there, ready with their people, journalism and array of platforms to provide the most trusted and comprehensive service to the local community and the nation. ■

Media consumption is now taking place across a wider array of devices and channels. A person’s attention is omnichannel, and smart marketers are adjusting plans to this new reality.

Even though media has long been transacted and measured separately by channel, marketers need to think holistically about media investments as well as their own operations. Everyone in the value chain, from creatives to buyers to technology and measurement, faces pressure to become proficient in multiple channels at once. At a high level, the drive to break down silos makes sense.

It would be a mistake, however, to pursue this rush to omnichannel at the expense of the key role played by channel specialists. Media convergence does require new systems and processes, but it doesn’t render decades of institutional know-how obsolete. There are excellent specialists across the industry, and convergence does not require them to forego their specialization and become jacks of all trades. That would be foolish. Rather, it is a question of finding new ways for specialists to communicate and collaborate with one another, and providing them with the tools to make it a seamless transition.

Agree on Common KPIs at the Outset

One of the first ways to do that is at the pre-planning process, uniting all stakeholders at the outset around a set of universal KPIs. Individual media channels have different nomenclatures and diverse standards for success; one may view performance as engagement, another as view-through, another as conversion. Omnichannel requires that they all eventually resolve into a universal understanding of media performance.

Today, that work of resolution takes place once the campaign is done, and after channel specialists have optimized against their channel-specific KPIs. But there’s no need to wait until the campaign is finished. Engage channel specialists early and tap their understanding of how their efforts contribute toward that universal KPI.

Continue to Innovate Within Channels and Apply Insights  Across Channels

Operating across channels does not obviate the need to continue innovating and optimizing within individual channels. There are real differences between, say, linear TV and digital video, and while both must act in concert as never before, there are still methods and techniques unique to each one. TV buyers might become proficient in negotiating deals with networks, in spotting attractive inventory on the spot markets, advocating for pod placement, or in optimizing creative for the big screen. By the same token, digital video specialists will be more adept at navigating the much more diverse landscape of inventory, searching for higher-performing, brand-safe opportunities that may be measured by engagement instead of view through. These skills are not pitted against one another as they converge into a single omnichannel reality. On the contrary, they become more cross-functional and translatable. Specialists have a lot to teach one other.

Help the Sell-Side Break Down Its Silos

Marketers aren’t alone in facing the omnichannel imperative. Sellers are also under the same pressure, and face similar challenges in overcoming old habits of thinking of channels in silos.

The demand to be omnichannel is, at this moment, most acutely being felt by the agency and marketer. Sellers know they need to catch up, and many of the largest networks have. But there are still many other sellers who know that they've only been selling their own thing, and that they’re too specialized to a specific channel or property.

Brands and agencies will play a critical role in helping to bring more sellers along into this omnichannel world. It may not be a matter of selling more diverse inventory, more formats or more channels, but simply understanding how their inventory contributes alongside other types to achieve those universal KPIs.

Forget Absolutes and Focus on Practical Next Steps

The omnichannel imperative is real - and urgent - but it does not mean the end of channel specialists or specialization. Breaking down silos has become a common cause for the industry, but it is in many ways an ill-suited metaphor to the true task at hand. The convergence of media does not ask us to view digital marketing as a monolith, and to think so would be to ignore the wealth of intelligence and know-how that has gotten us to this point. It’s not a question of breaking down silos as much as building bridges and tunnels between them.

On the contrary, channel expertise will be more essential than ever before. Rather than meld them all together, it’s a matter of ensuring that expertise is communicated, socialized, and leveraged more collaboratively. Supported by technology with the right connectivity and power, omnichannel can liberate experts to do what they do best. ■

Consumers of online local news, caveat emptor! A lot of the news you’re reading might be partisan political messaging. Your local television station might be the only reliable source for news about your community.

Roughly 2,500 local and regional newspapers have closed since 2005. Some have survived by going digital. In a best-case scenario, the online version of a local newspaper can provide decent coverage of City Hall, local sports, business and human-interest stories. Just as often, however, local news coverage is thin and mixed into a hodgepodge of ads and paid content from special interests.

Adding to this confusing landscape is the commandeering of journalism by partisan political operatives. Axios recently published a story detailing how Democratic strategists have been working with writers to concoct what look like news stories and then publish the pieces on what look like local news sites. The real aim of the stories and the websites, however, is to promote Democrats and hammer away at Republicans.

As the midterm election season began to get underway last year, Axios reported how websites suddenly appeared in states with contests that might decide whether Democrats can hang onto their thin majorities in Congress. With ink-stained sounding banners such as the Milwaukee Metro Times, the Mecklenburg Herald and the Tri-City Record, these news sites are part of a network of over 50 locally branded news sites that are the creation of Democratic public-affairs gurus.  

The sites all have aggregated local news content and short pieces about local sports and community events. Mixed in are the stories that read like legitimate news articles and often involve factual reporting, but which are ultimately political advertising with the veneer of journalism.

The practice is not entirely new. Nor is it limited to Democrats. Republican media and campaign entrepreneurs have built Metric Media into a network of roughly 1,200 sites with old-school newspaper names like the Des Moines Sun, Ann Arbor Times and Empire State Today. Metric Media boasts it publishes “over 5 million news articles every month.” A lot of these pieces are intended to smear Democrats and amplify GOP talking points.

With local print disappearing and deceptive websites proliferating, local television news needs to step and fill the news hole. Local newsrooms can rightfully claim to have held onto journalistic integrity and the trust of viewers. That is a good place to start.

Like print publications, television news operates with journalistic principles about facts, balance, and independence. Unlike the webmasters who operate in a murky stew of political advocacy and journalism, television reporters, anchors and producers must stand by their journalism and be accountable to their viewers. People still tune into and trust local television journalism. This past spring, a Gallup-John S. and James L. Knight Foundation survey found people have trust in local news coverage while skepticism is growing about national news media. 

There are investors in television stations who understand the value of local broadband news, such as Standard General’s Soo Kim, a strong proponent for authentic and in-depth reporting that reflects the priorities and voices of a local community. Local news is also good business, and leaders like Mr. Kim understand that the best way to attract and inform more viewers is to produce a high-quality product. By giving news operations more resources, Kim and other forward-thinking station owners can help usher in a renaissance in local journalism and citizen engagement, which is sorely needed in an ecosystem of misleading news slanted to suit political agendas. Standard Media is in the process of acquiring Tegna and its 64 stations in deal that will bring critical investment dollars to modernize local newsrooms across the country. The sooner the FCC approves this deal and allows it to proceed the better for anyone who cares about the future of local news.

Local newspapers once prided themselves on uncovering the truth, not their editorials. As these publications fade, the local television station is the only source of news on local government, economic issues, crime and community affairs. Executed well, television news can meet growing public demand for information, keep local political leaders accountable and strengthen the grass roots of democracy. In today’s untrustworthy media environment, it is all the more important for local television stations to provide citizens with well-reported and factual information about issues that affect them directly. Viewers want this. Kudos to station owners and operators who are committed to provided outstanding local news. ■

Throughout 2022, alternative TV-measurement solutions and currencies dominated headlines, presentations and panels — with most sellers predicting, even advocating, replacing Nielsen as TV’s data foundation. While sellers believe it’s time to overhaul TV measurement, buyers are less bullish for outright change  — especially given Nielsen’s recent partnerships with major digital players such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Roku.

When we talked to 200 advertisers this summer, they overwhelmingly said Nielsen will remain their primary currency for TV buys through the foreseeable future. While they agree panel data is outdated, only 46% support completely replacing Nielsen.

The reason: A fragmented measurement landscape makes a buyer’s job much harder. Of course, they want more accurate views of audiences. They simply don’t have the resources to select, test and ultimately manage multiple providers. Nor can they efficiently reconcile differences in audience counts when sellers use different currencies. 

That said, advertisers do see the value in using alternative currencies alongside Nielsen. And they believe alternative currencies will ultimately improve the TV advertising marketplace. So far, two in five advertisers that use alternatives to Nielsen find them just as effective as Nielsen, while one-third find them more effective than Nielsen. 

On average, advertisers now work with two providers and are willing to bring in a third. Among the uninitiated, more than half are open to discussion but haven’t made any inquiries.

Sellers need alternative measurement to get full value for audience delivery. With Nielsen strengthening its hold on planning, they need to advance a hybrid future. So, how do sellers get buyers to do what’s best for the business?

Define currency. Advertisers tell us they don’t fully understand the difference between alternative currency and measurement. A universal definition will help. Our survey defined currency as an agreed-upon metric, offering a guarantee that the media buyer and seller agree to use as the basis for transacting TV ad buys. 

Explain the emerging alternatives. Only 29% of advertisers consider themselves very familiar with alternative measurement approaches. Networks and providers need to explain the advantages of alternatives for specific advertisers and situations, starting with their largest accounts, which our research shows are most open to experimenting.

Demystify the methodologies. Advertisers are equally concerned with methodology and performance, and they need consistency of reporting based on robust data sets. Take the time to explain unique benefits in depth. And since every approach has blind spots, spell them out.

Provide the necessary scaffolding. Reassure buyers that alternative currencies can be used in a portion of buys and/or in parallel with Nielsen. Of the advertisers that have used an alternate measurement provider this year, most are testing and benchmarking against Nielsen. So, present exploratory opportunities that mitigate risk, and let advertisers evolve at their own pace.

Create an industry short list. Beyond individual sellers’ educational efforts, a short list of approved providers across the industry may move advertisers confidently en masse into alternate measurement and currency.

Advertisers are voting for a multi-currency world with Nielsen as the foundation. Their question isn’t whether alternate measurement and currencies can improve TV buying. It’s whether networks collectively can make buyers comfortable with a new way of doing business. ▪️

The devil is in the details, as they say, and for most marketers, the details of measurement are hellish indeed these days.

As marketers, we’ve spent years collecting data on consumers to understand how best to advertise to them. Marketers imagine a world where we know what consumers want before they want it, they click everything we serve them and they follow a beautiful hero’s journey: They have a problem, we save them from drudgery, they transform their lives and then they come back for more. The reality is much more prosaic: We track where they’ve been, we stalk them around the Web, we then hound them to buy and they do everything they can to evade giving us their information.

The truth is, we have created a vast industrial complex devoted to tracking consumer attention and what shoppers and buyers do when exposed to marketing messages. And yet, measuring that very thing has never been more convoluted, elusive or diabolically hard. And exhausting — for all parties involved.

Consumers are devouring more digital content than ever, but they’ve also gotten savvier. On the internet they’re skipping ads, installing ad blockers, denying third-party cookies and generally clamping down their privacy settings (whether intentionally or not). Suddenly, advertisers are flying blind on the internet as they lose targeting. And it’s worse in lean-back environments like connected TV where over-frequency, audience deduplication and viewability problems abound and ad fraud and audience identification issues are the norm.

It’s a Mess, But It Doesn’t Have To Be

Measurement is in a massive upheaval and the race for alternative measurement is on. While behavioral targeting gave us insights into consumers like never before, it's not effective anymore and won't stand the test of time when it comes to emerging environments and platforms or future privacy regulations. We can do so much better.

It’s time to get back to basics and put consumers first. Instead of trying to measure low-fidelity signals like impressions and clicks, technology is already smart enough to truly understand the context of a digital environment. It can read words, video, audio, metadata and more to understand the full context — and pair that environment with dynamic and engaging ad creative. Making those work together will change the face of digital advertising, no matter where it appears, making it something people find useful and delightful (without worrying about crossing the line on users’ personal data).

But context is just one part of it. Advanced attention solutions validate whether the ad creative is resonating or not in that environment (by way of increased or decreased attention). And then real-time optimization engines programmatically deliver the campaign accordingly.

Context, creative and attention combined is what I call the Mindset Matrix. Having these three things working in tandem allows advertisers to captivate a person’s mindset in current and emerging digital environments — without using any personally identifiable information. An analogy I like to use for this combination is the perfect hamburger: The bun is the context, the burger is the creative and the secret sauce is attention.

Individually They’re Good. Together They’re Magic  

For now, the digital measurement market is fractured and tortured. And it will continue to be as we try to understand the best ways to measure. Digital environments are coming online at lightning speed and a one-point solution like Nielsen is just not viable (and neither are third-party cookies). It used to be we just had Web and mobile to think about. Today we have myriad environments including in-game display, connected TV, your fridge screen and beyond, with more environments arriving every day (hello, AR and metaverse). But standards will emerge (they always do). And when they do, these principles of context, creative and attention need to be part of the solution. In fact, they already are today.

As a CEO with a passion to make advertising experiences better, my team and I have been advocating with the industry to shift us to a mindset-first mentality for measuring digital ads. We want to productize and leverage machine learning techniques within the ecosystem to get into the mindset of consumers.

We are also being very vocal to and supporting all the governing bodies in our space, including the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). And we’re initiating, investing in and leveraging case studies to help the industry see the value in mindset-first, privacy-forward solutions and to support them on their journeys.

Measurement is broken, full stop, and collectively we have our work cut out for us to get out of this infernal death spiral. But we also have some of the most innovative and smart people in the world working on advertising technology and the future of media and we can do this. Now let’s make it happen. ■

Television has changed a lot over the past 30 years. Our nation’s TV laws have not.

October 5, 2022, marks the 30th anniversary of the 1992 Cable Act, and American consumers continue to pay the price for these outdated regulations still on the books.

Just as the 2020s are an era of transformational change, so were the early 1990s. The Hubble Space Telescope launched, the World Wide Web debuted, the Soviet Union fell, and the United States elected a new president with fresh ideas and a new approach. And Congress enacted new cable legislation.  The goal at the time was admirable — Congress wanted to protect consumers and promote localism. But what remains today of this outdated law does neither.

The Cable Act established retransmission consent fees or “retrans fees,” which are payments that TV providers make to local broadcasters to carry their TV channels. When broadcasters lobbied Congress to create retransmission consent, they told Congress the fees would cultivate localism and help local affiliates. Today, however, those fees mostly flow to network conglomerates and satisfy ever-increasing Wall Street demands.

• Today, the “Big Four” national broadcast networks have largely seized their local affiliates’ control over retransmission consent decisions. They often dictate the terms under which consent can be granted and demand a huge cut of the stations’ retrans fees — called reverse retrans.
• Retrans fees represent the fastest-rising portion of consumer pay TV bills. Over the last 30 years, big broadcast conglomerates have collected more than $74 billion in retrans fees.
• On recent earnings calls, broadcasters have trumpeted the success of their retrans cash hauls. America’s largest broadcast company, Nexstar Media Group, is twice the size of its nearest competitor and reported $4.6 billion in 2021 revenue — 52% of which is from retrans fees. Standard General and Tegna together reported $1.38 billion in retransmission fees from their 2021 revenue sum of $2.7 billion. Gray Television’s retrans revenue topped $1 billion in 2021, reporting total revenues of $2.6 billion. An increasing amount of these fees are going to hedge funds like Apollo Global Management and Standard General, who buy broadcast stations to collect these fees. 

Worse yet, if pay TV subscribers do not concede to these demands for higher fees, broadcast conglomerates pull their signals — again, something the broadcasters promised would never happen back in 1992. This leaves the pay TV provider a choice: to either pay up or go dark. Either way, consumers lose with increased prices or by suffering through broadcaster blackouts.

Retrans blackouts are near epidemic levels, with consumers enduring more than 1,500 blackouts since 2010. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when consumers needed access to local news and information the most, there were more than 350 broadcaster blackouts — a record for a single year — affecting tens of millions of pay TV viewers. Broadcasters continuously weaponize TV blackouts, deliberately targeting live sports and other must-see TV, blacking out the Super Bowl, NFL and college football postseason games, the World Series, the Grammys, and network TV premieres. When blackouts finally end, consumers get their programming back, often at a higher cost.

As often happens when regulating any industry, it’s difficult to predict its future. In 1992, Congress couldn’t have envisioned the creation of Netflix or YouTube — or foresee watching TV on a cell phone or tablet. Congress couldn’t understand how this new framework would eventually fail consumers.

Today, we live in an instant, on-demand digital world. Consumers have unparalleled choice and competition for video content. The market has changed. Retrans is broken. The American Television Alliance looks forward to working with members of Congress to pass video marketplace reform that benefits consumers.

It’s time to modernize the rules that favor broadcasters at the expense of consumers. It’s time to bring America’s television laws into the 21st century. ▪️

In recent years, we’ve seen some pretty cool marketing tactics from political campaigns, including one candidate who enlisted the meme community and another’s foray into the world of video games. And while these past activations definitely exhibited a “cool” factor, this year’s 2022 midterm election marketing campaigns are banking on CTV for the “conversion” factor.

One of the obvious benefits of streaming is that it's a digital version of traditional linear media -- same content, same screen size, but with the ability to apply the benefits of programmatic ad buying. In simple terms, this means advertisers can do more than just target the “standard adults 25 to 54” they are accustomed to on linear, and leverage expanded segments including behavior, interests, and geography.

That’s why this year’s 2022 midterm elections are expected to exceed $8 billion in political ad spend, with an estimated 15% of that going to CTV, as candidates leverage streaming’s superior targeting abilities to connect with potential voters on a local level. Not to mention, CTV is redefining what “local” really means.

Getting Granular with Geography

There are 210 designated market areas (DMAs) in the U.S. and more than 41,000 zip codes within, which traditional linear TV allows advertisers to target viewers by. For political advertisers, however, targeting by zip codes doesn't quite cut it. When you break it down, congressional and legislative districts rarely line up with zip code maps, which sometimes forces candidates to buy an entire city or metro area in order to reach all the voters they want. This can result in a huge waste of money. 

Streaming, on the other hand, provides the ability to go beyond zip codes and target congressional and legislative districts from a geo perspective. This digital style targeting on television screens is something political campaigns were never able to access at scale before. And when you pair this with behavior and interest targeting, all of a sudden a political candidate can target “Democratic-leaning swing voters, that care about climate change, and live in a specific congressional district.”

This scenario recently played out in the primary for New York’s 19th Congressional District, which encompasses all or part of 11 different counties, spanning three different DMAs: New York City, Albany, and Utica. Instead of putting all their money into linear -- where they would have had to spend money across all three DMAs including the very expensive New York market -- campaigns utilized streaming to limit their buys to households within the district, making those buys far more cost-effective.

Understanding the Outcomes

Another benefit of streaming being digitally delivered is that it allows candidates to transcend the probabilistic feed they’re accustomed to on linear and get down to deterministic data. Sure, linear provides a confirmation that your spot ran on this channel at this time, but streaming provides a wealth of information that is tied to a specific household based on data from IP addresses, device IDs, and geolocation. 

All those data signals coming in can be leveraged towards performance-based attribution and measurement. So candidates can see which people were exposed to what ad, and if they went to the website, joined the email list, downloaded an app, donated to the campaign, or actually walked into a physical location to vote. This is a huge step up from linear where at most candidates can determine that their ad ran, and then probabilistically attribute activity to it during a window of time. 

In recent years, we’ve seen some innovative attempts to tap into culture, but this year candidates are focused on optimizing messaging, speaking to local voters and driving conversions. And at a time when the digital is struggling to adjust to privacy regulations, iOS changes, and the sunsetting of the cookie, CTV is offering a privacy-compliant, one-stop-shop platform for candidates to drive conversions. ■

It’s primary season across the U.S., and political conversations are everywhere—and on every screen. Out for coffee this morning, I overheard an argument over who had won last night’s primary debate. The first person had watched the debate live at home, whereas the second person had only seen highlight clips of the morning news on social media.

In thinking about the abundance of content, new platforms and services, I started thinking about how this particular example highlights just how extensive and broad our multi-screen usage has grown—and across all age groups. The abundance of second- and third-screen usage is also prevalent across the country—not just major metros like New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Many midsize designated market areas (DMAs) are showing signs of evolving viewing habits. The Raleigh, N.C. DMA, for example, has a TV universe estimate for adults 18+ of 2.4 million, and its residents are avid cross-platform news consumers, especially during primary season. In looking at reach, one of the market’s leading TV stations reaches 500,000 people each month. Importantly, that reach is split across platforms. Said differently, people in Raleigh don’t just get their news from the living room TV right before dinner.

We know that people are constantly connected to their devices for social media connectivity, texting with friends and leveraging digital channels for entertainment options that aren’t available across linear channels. But the lines between linear and digital are blurring. In Raleigh, half of the above-mentioned station’s audience watches its content on both traditional linear channels and digital ones (mobile, computer, tablet). Somewhat surprisingly, only 14% of adults 55-64 watch on just TV[1].

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the audience that’s using multiple platforms—and the impact this has when you consider the upside for brands and advertisers. Specifically, the shift to multiple screens adds significant lift when we consider the audience members who are 55-64—a demo that marketers and planners and buyers typically exclude from their targeting efforts. Yet for this Raleigh station, the overall audience increases by 27% when viewing across all platforms includes the 55-64 audience[2].

The engagement among the older demo is simply a reflection of the country’s overall population shift—one that has been happening over the past decade across the whole country, not just in Raleigh. Yet in Raleigh, 1.5% of the TV universe has transitioned from the 25-54 segment to the 55-64[3] segment. And when we look at multi-device usage among this older group, we see that this group of active news consumers is also contributing to the broadening reach that comes from growing cross-platform usage.

It's been a while since marketers, planners, buyers and programmers were able to think about audiences through the lens of a single channel or platform, but it’s possible that older audiences haven’t been central in that thinking. Not only does the 55-64 demo outspend larger cohorts, it is continually leveraging different platforms and devices to stay informed and plugged into the ins and outs of the daily news cycle, especially when big political stories are breaking. ■

In August, we watched our favorite programs, movies and events over streaming platforms in greater numbers than on regular broadcast or cable TV. While overall viewership of broadcast and cable was down 10% on average, streaming on Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus and HBO Max, among others, accounted for over 35% of total viewing.

The segue from broadcast and cable to streaming is in full swing, as recent data from Nielsen’s Gauge suggests. Advertisers, brands, sports leagues and event producers are keenly aware of this shift and are adjusting their investments accordingly. Reliable data points out that over $781 billion will be spent globally on advertising in 2022. In the coming years, more and more of these dollars will go to streaming platforms.

If the Emmys are any indication of popularity and future profit, we can understand how HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Disney and Prime combined for a total of 23 primetime awards. In the first NFL all-digital package, Amazon paid $1 billion per year to stream Thursday Night Football through 2033. And that’s on top of the $11 billion it spent on streaming video and content the year before for more than 200 million Prime members. Although watching football over streaming takes some adjustment, it's hard to blame the NFL for blitzing the bank.

In fact, we should expect more of these kinds of deals in the future. As audiences follow the content across every platform, the old rules for measuring media no longer apply. With systemic changes in consumer viewing, there have to be systemic changes in measuring audiences as well. Since viewing occurs across platforms, so too should measurement systems. Advertisers — and indeed viewers — deserve nothing less.

The conventional methods of audience measurement are in transition. Industry incumbents Nielsen and Comscore are awaiting accreditation from the Media Rating Council and planning to launch new products. Upstart measurement firms are experimenting with novel, untested methods. Meanwhile, advertisers, networks, broadcasters, publishers and brands crave stability, predictability and reliability in measuring what is being seen by tens of millions of viewers.

Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer for the advertising giant Interpublic Group, recently said, “It’s hard enough to measure some of these new devices and the new data sets that are flowing through them, but it becomes even harder if you don't have consistent standards.”

With billions of dollars at stake, it is a real problem with market risks and ramifications.

But hope springs eternal. After reviewing the options, I believe the solution may be found in a recently released special report titled, “The New Rules of Media Measurement.”

According to the Media Institute report, the advertising and media ecosystem needs three things now: (1) a uniform currency; (2) a strong self-regulatory regime; and (3) an industry-agreed set of principles for measurement.

First, there needs to be a reliable currency to buy and sell advertising. There should be a uniform system to measure everyone no matter where or how they happen to consume media. And there should be an independent, objective umpire to interpret and enforce the rules of the game.

Second, we cannot overstate the significant role and responsibility of the Media Rating Council (MRC) as the implacable cornerstone of the media and advertising ecosystem. Maintaining a fully empowered MRC is essential to upholding the highest ethical and performance standards.

Third, the industry must mutually agree on a few basic principles that should be intrinsic for any media measurement system. Here are 12 attributes that should be immediately adopted: accountable, independent, comprehensive, inclusive and representative, transparent, consistent, adaptable, privacy-compliant, cross-platform, uniform, efficient and accurate.

If the movement for reliable media measurement is to progress, these principles may be the keys to success. ■

(c) 2022  Adonis E. Hoffman 

There’s been a lot written lately about the perceived challenges with CTV measurement across both programming and ads. 

And to be sure, the relatively nascent CTV market does have much maturing to do in terms of standardized measurement practices. These growing pains are only amplified by the increasingly growing number of users flocking to CTV devices and services. 

But the measurement challenges gaining attention today are not so much a factor of the CTV format as they are a result of trying to apply digital advertising solutions to what is still a TV experience. 

On one hand, the “connected” part of CTV is digital by nature. It therefore has the potential to be more contextually relevant to audiences with better measurement opportunities in comparison to traditional TV advertising. But while programming (and ads) sent to CTV devices share a common transmission method as that sent to mobile phones, laptops, and tablets, the TV is an inherently different kind of device. 

For instance, viewers interact with those other devices differently than with a TV. A TV uses a remote. Those other devices use touch screens, links, and more. That interaction provides different types of engagement signals than TV, and as such measure differently. 

What’s more, digital measurement solutions created for phones and similar devices assume a single-viewer scenario. TV, however, is a shared experience, usually with multiple viewers watching the same programming (add ads) on the same screen at the same time in the same room (which is why co-viewing metrics are so important).

CTV is a wholly unique environment. It’s a TV environment. So it must be measured with practices that take into account the uniqueness of the TV reality.

Yet despite these fundamental differences, many are still trying to apply the same technology used to measure mobile/computer ad viewability to the TV space. Forgive the cliche, but that’s the classic definition of forcing a square peg into a round hole.

While buying ad inventory across multiple service platforms is relatively simple, measuring ads across them all can be incredibly complex. The maze of pathways, technologies, and partnerships between ad services, content providers, and streaming platforms is simply too fragmented to find the solution there.

To date, we’ve gotten away with it because the volume of activity and spending was relatively low. Asking that maze to police itself is sort of like grading your own homework. But all that is changing. Brands spending tens of millions on CTV ads are demanding independent, accurate, third-party measurement.

And therein lies the challenge. While digital measurement solutions won’t work for the CTV environment, traditional TV measurement models won’t work either. The Nielsen framework was created for a world of content scarcity, where a large number of viewers had a limited number of programming choices. So a panel system based on the viewing habits of just 20,000 users made sense…then. 

Clearly, the streaming TV space has far more choices both in the programming itself and the source of that programming. That’s where the fragmentation comes from. There are multiple content providers and streaming platforms, each with their own ad inventory and data systems, with very little transparency or standardization between them. 

But there is one constant, one single point of truth that supersedes it all: the destination. 

Rather than searching for answers across disparate content providers, service platforms, ad services and others adding to the fragmentation, look to one destination where all this activity ends -- the TV.

After all, TV-specific challenges require TV-specific solutions. 

The TV set is the independent point of truth through which all ads, programming, and content flows regardless of the source. 

The point is made abundantly clear in the recent news from iSpot and GroupM that 17% of ads served through peripheral streaming devices are delivered to TV sets that are off. The peripheral can’t tell if the TV is on or not. But that same study also affirms, ads delivered to devices always hit the glass. 

Sure, peripheral manufacturers can work on better recognizing the "off" signal from the TVs they’re plugged into. And streaming platforms can introduce more prompts to ensure viewers are still engaged. But neither really gets to the core question, which is "what’s on the screen."

The most accurate answer to that question comes from smart TV manufacturers with the technology to report on what the screen is showing. Glass-level automatic content recognition data that answers these questions at the most centralized point-- the TV screen. 

It’s an independent verification that has the potential to clear up all this confusion and establish at long last the single point of truth advertisers seek. Of course, there are a few steps needed to reach that goal.

First, smart TVs will soon be the default UX in the home, replacing peripherals, dongles, and any other workaround that’s been utilized to date. Streaming content to an unconnected TV via an external connected device won’t generate the glass-level ACR data we’re talking about. The good news is that smart TV penetration has reached an all-time high in the U.S. And all new TVs sold are likely to be connected TVs -- it’s almost impossible to find a set that is not internet-enabled.

Next is standardization of how CTV is counted. While the second-by-second, attribution and other digital-like qualities adopted by CTV are a net plus, if the marketplace does not factor in co-viewing, brands and publishers will be swapping small panels for bad math and leaving money and viewership allocation on the table.

This industry needs every resource at its disposal to ensure the full promise of CTV advertising is realized. If left unchecked, today’s uncertainties around CTV ad verification could stunt the growth of the CTV market just when it's poised to take off.

The takeaway here is that the TV is no longer just a dumb piece of hardware that only displays content. It’s evolved into a smart, connected device with sophisticated software designed for the unique TV environment. As such, it’s a mistake to overlook the solutions smart TVs can offer to today’s CTV challenges. ■