Platform obsessions and definitional hell
The difficulty of disentangling duplication in adland’s revenues figures is causing serious confusion, writes Dominic Mills. Plus: Why brands must stop asking customers to do their hard work
As I expected, the radio industry – in the form of Mark Barber – chose to challenge my assertion that, when it came to digital revenues, radio wasn’t performing as well as it might.
You can read the original column from last week here – go towards the bottom – and Barber’s response here.
If I can summarise Barber’s argument, it is this: that, if you count spot revenue against DAB listening and various other digital interfaces as ‘digital’, then its share of revenue from digital is about 50%, rather than the 5% I calculated.
Ok, that is one way of looking at it. But if you applied the same logic to TV, then any ad viewed on a connected TV set also counts as digital. According to Statista, smart TV penetration in the UK is around 42-45%. That, if you were to use Barber’s methodology, would mean a significant increase in TV digital revenue.
Perhaps I am mixing in the wrong circles, but I have yet to meet anyone who sees it like that. Broadband TV News, for example, reckons connected TV ad revenues will be around £220m by 2020 – miles below what they would be if you called any ad on a smart TV digital.
And so it seems to me that our platform obsession is driving us into a definitional hell driven, in large part, by the difficulty of disentangling duplication.
To give two examples from the methodology small print of the AA/Warc spend data warning us against double counting: one, newsbrand digital revenues are duplicated on internet display, classified, recruitment and non-recruitment numbers; and two, broadcaster VoD revenues appear both in TV and internet categories. You can read the small print here.
Are there other duplications too? Does any radio revenue come under the mobile heading?
Time for some better industry definitions and segmentations? What say you also @newsworks_uk @MagneticMedia @IABUK?
— Tess Alps (@TessAlps) 10 August 2018
Clearly, judging by Tess Alps’s comments on Twitter, there is a degree of industry concern
The more I think about it, the more confused I get. And the real danger of this is that, in focusing on the platforms, we miss the bigger stories.
This is compounded if, in a macro sense, sentiment and budgets shift on the basis of these figures.
And the biggest crime of all, is that in the way we analyse and report on the stats, the platform has become more important than the content provider. As brand safety and context become more important (about time too), that balance needs to be made more equal.
Of course, I accept that where (and when) you consume content and ads really matters, hence the focus on mobile. But there is a difference (and we can argue about how large it is) between mobile consumed out of the home and mobile consumed in the home, all the more so if it is part of a second-screening experience.
Let me leave you with another ‘mobile’ definitional conundrum. We accept mobile refers to the device, but in advertising terms out-of-home consumption is a critical factor. When we’re out and about – i.e. mobile in the original sense of the word – we consume both paper-and-paste and digital OOH ads. So too, in-car listening is a truly mobile experience.
And now I need to stop because I’m going mad.
Oi, brands – don’t make me do all your hard work
According to the latest figures, the UK’s GDP rose 0.4% in Q2. Academic wonks will understand how, these days, GDP is an increasingly unreliable measure of economic activity (anybody really keen to get their heads round the issue can read this book by FT journalist David Pilling.)
He identifies a number of reasons, but one is that activities that used principally to be carried out by companies have been passed on to consumers. Self-checkout at the supermarkets is one obvious example. Automated telephone-response systems are another. So, too, is the way we check in for flights ourselves and print our own tickets. The result: the companies bear little or none of certain physical or labour costs, and the burden is shifted over to us.
Research is another example, and one that is provoking me this week. I bought some socks and stuff at M&S, and the nice guy on the till invited me to go online and fill in the questionnaire on customer service. “It’ll only take four minutes,” and the way he looked down at the floor suggested he was both embarrassed and probably telling a porky.
Four chuffing minutes! To tell them what it was like buying some socks. No way.
Still, that wasn’t as bad as Halifax, which invited me to ”share my thoughts” on its service. “We’re all ears,” it declared, before telling me it would take 5-10 minutes to complete the survey.
Well, Halifax, if you really are all ears…HOW ABOUT GETTING OUT OF MY !***%$ SPACE PLEASE.
Halifax tries, of course, to flatter me by telling me I’m a valued customer. But I don’t bank there, and only have a credit card that I use occasionally. But I don’t get the sense that whoever included me even knows that.
It’s the same with Eurostar, whose email landed before I’d even completed my journey. At least Eurostar offered an incentive – entry into a prize draw for a chance to win one of two hampers. Wow. As incentives go…pathetic.
That’s three examples in two days – that I noticed. There are probably dozens of other examples lurking in my inbox.
Leaving aside for the time being the sheer crassness with which these companies try to get consumers to do their work for them, I question – in terms of purity of research – the value of these exercises.
One, via self-selection, there is nothing remotely representative about the people who respond. Two, there is a marginal chance people who had an exceptional service might respond, but a higher chance those who had a bad experience will. Those in the middle will ignore it. So I suspect the numbers of responses will be both low and skewed as to be meaningless.
And third, certainly with M&S and Eurostar, responses will come in over an extended period of time, meaning that they won’t be much help at all.
So why bother? Somewhere in these organisations someone is saying ‘to be customer-centric we must listen to the voice of the customer’. But the customer is saying ‘I’m not going to do your work for you.’ If these companies truly want to be customer-centric, as they all say they do, they’ll need to up their game.