How Big Brands and Small Businesses Can Leverage CTV | Lee Doyle

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Lee Doyle, Chief Investment Officer at Empower Media. Lee is an industry-recognized marketing, communications, and media agency leader with over 30 years of experience working with top marketers. His clients have included AT&T, Bacardi, Campbell's, Colgate, Dell Computers, Ikea, Netflix, Johnson and Johnson, Kraft, Paramount Pictures, Proctor and Gamble, Target, and many others. Prior to his current role at Empowered Media, Lee spent 18 years at group M/WPP in a variety of roles across several of their media agencies in both strategic planning and buying capacities. Finally, I want to mention that Lee has been a consultant and advisor to Simpli.fi since 2019. Lee is here to talk about how CTV/OTT has evolved and what it means for small business owners. Lee, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Lee Doyle: Good to be here, David. David McBee: Happy to have you back. This is your second round and that makes you a VIP. So, excited to hear from you today. Lee Doyle: At five rounds do I get a green jacket or a special robe or anything? No? David McBee: After five interviews I promise we'll do something very special. Very special. Lee Doyle: Okay. David McBee: All right, so, Lee, let's get right to the topic of hand, which is the CTV/OTT landscape. It's come a long way and it continues to change, and I was wondering if you could just kind of outline what are the biggest differences now as compared to where it was a year ago? Lee Doyle: Yeah, well, the good news for advertisers is that the supply of advertising-supported connected TV has continued to grow. You've had players like Netflix enter the market within the last year. Amazon turned every Prime customer into an advertiser-supported customer. So that adds a lot of new supply to the equation, as well as, we're seeing a lot of growth in the viewing to some of the, I would call them secondary streaming services that people weren't as familiar with. Tubi, Pluto, some of those services have really grown and they're now in the top 10 in terms of overall viewership. So that's been great. The increased supply has also helped to bring down cost. In the world of television, there's a supply and demand equation, and what we've suffered through for many years in the linear world was shrinking supply and increasing demand, which drove up CPMs. At least now on the connected TV side, we're seeing things go the other way where there is a growth in supply. There's still demand, but fortunately, the supply is growing faster than demand in a lot of instances. David McBee: So I know when I watch streaming TV and I see the commercials, I still see a lot of the big brands, the Hondas, the Coca-Colas and such, but SMBs, small and medium businesses are now poised to really take advantage of streaming television. Is it the time for them to do so? Lee Doyle: Absolutely. I think streaming TV and connected TV really opened the door to a business of any size being involved in television. That didn't used to be the case when we were in a linear-only world. In order to use television effectively, you had to buy it at a full market, a full DMA level, which, for a lot of very small businesses, if they only have a handful of locations, let's say in Chicago, it isn't cost-effective for them to advertise in the entire Chicago market. Whereas with connected TV, we can do very, very precise geo targeting, which allows us to keep the cost under control, keep it really narrow to their trade zone. So I think this opens the door to a whole new slew of advertisers that otherwise wouldn't be in television at all. So, yeah, it's democratizing television to a certain degree, allowing a lot of smaller businesses to get in there. And even ones where it isn't a narrow geographic footprint where it's a very selective audience. Some of the early adopters of things like addressable TV were companies like American Express, where for a gold or a platinum card, you had to have a certain credit score in order to even be a potential customer or a potential target. And through some more precise targeting, even at a national scale, you can really narrow down your audiences to the folks who are really viable as potential consumers of products and services. David McBee: So let's talk real briefly directly to those SMBs. A lot of them have felt like television was out of reach for them in the past. Now we've got smaller geos that they can target, it's less expensive. Are there any other benefits for a small and medium business to really take advantage of this channel? Lee Doyle: Well, I think the other advantage is that an awful lot of connected TV is not skippable, so you're really getting exposure and it's a lean back environment. When people are watching on the big screen, they may have the remote control in hand, but it isn't quite the same as trying to reach somebody on a mobile device or on a laptop. And often on a mobile device, when people are out and around, they're too busy doing other things to really focus on video messages that come up. They try to zip through them as fast as they can. So that impact that you can get from a lean back audience that's paying full attention to your message is another one of the benefits of being in TV. David McBee: And that's valuable for American Express or the little Mexican restaurant down the street? Yeah. Lee Doyle: Yeah, for anybody. In the age of DVRs, which haven't entirely gone away, but that was the fear that everything is going to be skipped through. No one's going to see my commercials. And what's evolved as streaming evolved is, well, the publishers have to protect their revenue, and the only way to protect it is make sure that the advertising that's in it is working effectively for the people that are investing in it or the companies that are investing in it. So they've been a lot better, I think, as they've evolved their model to a streaming model to make sure that ... The other thing that has been good when you're comparing to linear TV is, in many instances, a lower commercial load. So we're not hitting advertisers with as many different messages in the average hour on a lot of these platforms. Greater attentiveness, fewer things that you're competing with for their attention. David McBee: When I first saw that Amazon Prime had commercials, I was like, "Hang on a second, I'm willing to pay to not see those," which is ironic considering how I make a living, but that doesn't even seem to be a choice. But there's so few commercials I've been able to tolerate it. Lee Doyle: Well, I think one of the other things, and this is another way that streaming has evolved, the early adopters that jumped into streaming, oftentimes you would see the same message multiple times within a single hour. What people have got to get better at and have been getting better at is capping frequency. And that's another way that the effectiveness of connected TV can be improved to make sure you're not just bombarding the same people over and over, that you are ideally achieving some broader reach. David McBee: Thank you for saying that. I remember there was one brand, and I won't call them out, but I was like, "I am not going to go buy a hamburger at your restaurant because I am so tired of your theme song." All right, I'm going to shift gears a little bit. I want to know what advice you have for an advertiser who is running television to tell if the campaign is actually working. Lee Doyle: Yeah, I mean there's a growing number of platforms that are starting to develop shoppable solutions. I think that's really still in its infancy. I think of those sorts of things as sort of still in beta, if you will. There are advertisers that are starting to incorporate QR codes as a response mechanism in their ads. So those are great. If you are more of an e-commerce play, if you're more of a direct consumer play where you're selling online, for most of the advertisers that we're currently working with and frankly where most of the ad dollars are, when you look at things from a big picture perspective, they're coming from what I would call brand building efforts. And when I say brand building, it sounds like a soft thing. It sounds like, oh, I'm building brand. I don't know how that translates to sales. So what a lot of them are doing is media mix modeling, similar to what they've been doing for years. A lot of sophisticated advertisers have been using that tool and really looking at the correlation between their sales data and their media placement data. So that's a really good way to assess how is connected TV performing relative to what I can do with online display, online video, perhaps linear TV. Any channels that I'm in that I can capture enough granular data to do that kind of analysis, that's a pretty good way of going at it. But you really do have to interrogate those models and look beyond just the final ROAS or return on advertising spend calculation and understand what's inside of it. And by that I mean is price the thing that's holding back ROAS because a lot of connected TV is premium priced relative to other channels like display online video and linear TV, or is it getting a really good lift? And looking at those two independently is another way to consider how can I fine tune, how can I improve the effectiveness of that investment? David McBee: I really like your comment about the media mix. Could you explain how A CTV advertiser can pair display with their CTV campaign in order to drive web traffic? Lee Doyle: Well, yeah, a lot of it is using retargeting. So, certainly we look at any engagement that we're getting from any of our messages. Really thinking through the customer journey, if you will. What have they seen? What else can we show them that might close the sale? So there are some different approaches. One of them is, hey, anybody who's interacted, anybody who's in my consumer database, I'm going to target them or build lookalikes to target them in connected TV just like I would in any other programmatic medium. And then the flip side is, if I know which households have been exposed to my connected TV ad, I can then retarget them with display or online video to hopefully close the sale and bring them to the website for either more information or to make an actual purchase there. So, kind of working at it in different directions. David McBee: That's great advice. All right, final topic. Live sports and news have traditionally been linear focused, but they're finding their way over into CTV aren't they? Lee Doyle: They certainly are and that's another big development this year has been some very high profile moves in terms of moving live sports into the world of streaming and connected TV. One of the stats that caught my attention was, during NFL playoff season, Peacock drew one of the biggest audiences of all time to their streaming. And I think that's really a peek into the future there. One of the main things that a lot of consumers have been holding onto their cable subscriptions, their linear cable, is to get that live sports that wasn't available in streaming, but now we're seeing the door open wide to that. So I think that's going to further accelerate cord cutting. People kind of looking at rebundling. What makes sense for them? What are they really getting value from? And there's new players in that space. There was that big announcement not too long ago where Warner Brothers Discovery, Disney, and I guess it was NBCU, were all coming together to develop a new sports platform, which we are still waiting to hear more about, but another effort at increasing supply and options. And ideally more supply and more options should be good for advertisers and marketers. David McBee: All right. Well, let's wrap things up. Why don't you tell viewers the best way to learn more about you specifically? Lee Doyle: Sure. I guess the easiest way to find me, I'm on LinkedIn. Lee Doyle, and people don't seem to have a problem finding me there. And you can reach me through that and if we have something to talk about, we'll set up some time. David McBee: Great. Lee, thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. Lee Doyle: Happy to do it, David. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi and follow us on LinkedIn to be notified of new episodes. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time ...