Jenny, I can’t think of it the last time I watched ABC, NBC, any of those broadcast TV.
No, that’s not true. I watch a lot of football, but I don’t watch ABC unless it’s like sports.
Why are we still buying broadcast TV?
Ooh, the most hated question of every media buyer.
That’s our topic today.
Yeah, happy to debunk some of this stuff. There’s a lot of research out that is showing
us that we should be putting all of our eggs into the bucket of streaming, but there’s
still definitely some strong reasons as to why we should be keeping broadcast on our
plans.
Let’s set the stage first. What is TV?
Yeah, so when we talk about TV, we’re going to talk about three buckets. It’s our broadcast,
cable and streaming in our broadcast. Everyone is aware, ABC, NBC, CBS, all of those
local affiliates. We’re getting a lot of our news. Then cable, of course, through a cable
provider, like a Comcast, where we’re getting a lot of our networks, like a TBS, TNT, Discovery.
Then streaming really is where we’re bypassing cable to get all of that content, but it can
be the same type of show content that we’re getting and streaming versus cable.
But it’s over the air. It’s bypassing a cable provider and using the Internet to reach
that audience.
Yeah, and let’s make the distinction between sitting on my phone and sitting on my couch and
watching the big screen TV.
Yeah, so we’ll kind of think of TV as like a real TV screen.
So most of the broadcast, most of the cable is consumed on the real TV screen.
Streaming is pretty fragmented, right? A lot of that is on a TV screen, but a lot of that
is on mobile devices. If I were to go to a broadcast by, they would never say do you want
all TV devices or do you want TV mobile? But with streaming, that is something that I would
specify.
If I’m looking at it as a true TV extension, I would specify TV only devices.
If I didn’t care where it ran, then you know, mobile is fine as well too.
Got it. So for today’s conversation, we’re going to separate things like mobile as we’ll
put that in the online video bucket. But today, we’re really only talking about TV and
we’re defining that as a real TV sit down on the couch, watch it.
Correct.
Got it. So where is the TV watching audience going? Like everyone’s doing streaming now,
right?
Yeah. So it’s, you know, Nielsen has released kind of the, they come out twice a year.
So this summer, they came out with the latest report showing that streaming is actually
making up about 38% of TV viewing.
And wait, Nielsen is a guy?
Yeah. Yeah. He’s a guy in the back room, like the Wizard of Oz.
You know, he’s kind of the standard for TV measurement, TV viewing in fact in the past
they didn’t even measure streaming. So over the last few years, it’s been brought
into measurement. And for, you know, the first time it’s finally surpassed cable and broadcast
in the latest kind of June report that they’ve shared. So about 38% are consuming TV through
streaming online, online, well, online being internet. And then it’s about 30% cable and
actually 20% broadcast. So broadcast is the lowest of the three.
But in this Nielsen, the gauge report you’re talking about, some of those numbers might be
a little misleading, right? Especially when it comes to the popularity of streaming.
Yeah. So I think the first thing you think of is just how fragmented streaming is. So kind
of like cable, right? You’ve got hundreds of networks. Streaming, there’s a lot of different
public, the same networks or publishers that are providing content that you can get streaming
through. And you know, it expands from there. So I think one is just the fragmentation.
When you look at the numbers, you see, okay, it’s 20% broadcast, 38% streaming while my
broadcast is CBS and BC ABC Fox, you know, you’ve got like your, you know, public broadcasting
and some other channels in there too. But for the most part, it’s kind of this big four.
It’s a lot less fragmented than YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, Pluto, you know, other
fast supported, you know, free ad supported TV, it virtually every other, you know, provider
out there. So it’s like four versus 100. And then I think the other thing is when you look
at this data that’s been provided is the number one. So the number one, publisher for streaming
TV is YouTube. So that’s not, you know, necessarily it’s not bad content. It’s just not necessarily
premium content on a TV screen. Yeah, YouTube isn’t real TV. Yeah. And you know, another thing
to think of is just, you know, when we talk about TV and we talk about premium quality,
right? What we’re on the streaming side, what we really want to focus on is FEP inventory,
that’s full episode players or 22 minute show, right? So from watching a 22 minute episode
of friends with ad breaks built in on cable or I’m watching it on streaming like that, that
that show is my FEP inventory. Well, I don’t go to YouTube to watch FEP inventory, right?
I go to YouTube to watch user generated content or maybe clips of that, that full episode
inventory, but I’m not going into watch like a full TV show. And I think the other thing
that’s really important to call out here is in that report. YouTube does not include
YouTube TV. So it’s truly YouTube does it, it can be viewed on the TV screen, but it’s
not the YouTube TV kind of, you know, streaming. I canceled my cable and I added YouTube TV.
That’s not in these numbers. Yeah. So this reports a little misleading, at least in the
eyes of us like advertisers, right. It’s streaming, but it’s not only on my TV premium content,
right? And I think like as a maybe someone who’s not in marketing, maybe the CEO of the company,
maybe, you know, just someone who’s never actually counted and like looked at these buys,
might think, oh, all of my streaming video is running on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, you
know, that’s where it is. And that’s just not true at all. Got it. So let’s talk about broadcast.
Give me the case for broadcast TV advertising for zoos aquariums, gardens, museums. Is this
a viable option for us still? Yes. In most cases, it is obviously market, my market, it’s
going to vary, but I think one of the most important things to remember is with a nonprofit
attraction, you know, you’re trying to spread your mission to every generation, right? You’re
trying to drive a situation from a pretty large audience and a local market and even expanding
outside of that market. And you know, broadcast can still provide a strong reach against all,
you know, several audiences. So kind of that multi-generational spread our mission, spread
awareness, broadcast can still be a really great, you know, part of your overall media plan.
So you think this idea of like nobody’s watching will yes the data is showing it shifting
to streaming. And if you dive into the data, we’re seeing it’s like younger versus older
and we’ll put the line up 40. Our millennials aren’t exactly like little kids anymore, right?
But our, you know, our millennial audience, which is definitely a primary segment for many
nonprofit attractions because we’re trying to reach parents with kids and a lot of millennials
have kids now. So that audience is probably is is going to be easy to reach for streaming.
But when we’re talking about the millennials parents, right? Our baby boomers or Gen X, like
they’re still going to be able to be reached with broadcast TV. And if that they’re watching
broadcast and streaming is what we’re seeing. So where is our millennial audiences watching
mainly streaming are older, boomers and Gen X are doing broadcast and streaming. So it’s a it’s a
good reach extension when we talk about adding streaming onto our broadcast buys. Yeah, you kind
of touched on that, but you know, give me give me the reasons on why should we complicate our
marketing efforts even more and consider buying streaming TV. Well, like I just said, reach
extension. So it’s going to be hard to go in. I think in the past, we used to think, how do I,
how do I reach more people with my my media dollars and it was buy more TV and now I’m more broadcast
TV. I’m more broadcast TV. Right. So now what we’re saying is, well, yeah, buy more TV, but don’t just buy
more broadcast. We’re going to buy streaming to complement our broadcast, right? Or maybe we’re
going to carve off some of our broadcast dollars to move it over to streaming. So we, you know,
we still are going heavy after TV potentially for our strategy, but TV is not just broadcast anymore,
broadcasting cable now it’s broadcast cable and streaming or broadcast and streaming or in some
cases, maybe just streaming. Yeah, I’m thinking, you know, I’m the marketing director and we’ve set a
goal where we just want to reach millennials that, you know, the family with young kids in the house,
22, I’m sorry, 25, 44 is my demo. I’m going to put all my eggs in that basket. It seems like
if that was the strategy, then streaming only would be the execution in terms of TV dollars.
Yeah, I think that could absolutely be a viable strategy to go streaming only if you’re reaching
that 25 to 40 audience. The, you know, another great strategy or tactic around kind of more streaming
is if you’re trying to expand outside of a market. So maybe you’re running your broadcast to really
have like high reach against a very large audience in your local market, but now you’re looking at
expanding that footprint sum and you might not be, you might have the budgets or you might not be
quite ready to go in and reach everyone and a, you know, completely new DMA, but you can start
expanding that that footprint by a radius. So maybe I want to expand outside of my DMA by 10 or 20
miles or a drive distance versus saying I’m going to go in and buy, you know, another entire DMA with
broadcast that’s going to actually be kind of cost prohibitive really. So we’re looking at, or,
you know, you can start kind of gradually expanding that footprint, we’re streaming where you’re
doing a zip or radius targeting. I like that. One of the limitations of broadcast TV is you have to buy
the entire DMA. Yeah, market. Yeah. Right. Well, okay. So we’ve been talking about streaming, but
cable offers that granularity when it comes into geo. I can buy a zone in another DMA. I can buy
heavy up on a zone within my DMA. Talk to me about the benefits of streaming over cable. Is it
either or do you do both? Why would I want to pick one? Go for it. So it comes back to the audience.
So if, again, if I was trying to reach, you know, my older audience, I might look at broadcasting
cable together. I think in most cases, now what we’re seeing is that streaming is replacing cable,
right? Our cord cutting has to do with I’m cutting the cable cord, not necessarily the broadcast cord.
So the trend is moving. Obviously, the streaming, streaming is already surpassed cable.
But, you know, that’s usually where we’re seeing like it’s broadcast, broadcast and streaming, or,
you know, streaming only versus it’s, I’d say, it’s kind of rare that we’ve gone into a market.
Lately, I’m really just done like a cable only by.
Got it. So cables declining in its penetration, you know, mission cord cutting,
it seems like streaming is eating cables lunch. The broadcast is still a viable play for a
broad-re-trading. Yeah, exactly. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations
on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing.
Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media. Attend media is a media planning
and buying agency, specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information,
please visit attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny. Okay, so, buying streaming TV, this isn’t as easy
as calling up the local rep and saying, hey, I want to buy ABC local news. Streaming is complex.
Yeah. Well, I’d say the first thing that you want to think about, I remember is just as we
started this conversation, all streaming TV is not on TV. So you do need to specify what you’re
buying. And I do think it’s important to at least know what you’re buying, even if it’s not all
running on TV. What we don’t want to do is we’re going back, the CEO of the company is thinking,
everything we’re running is on Netflix or everything we’re running is on Hulu because it’s not
right. So just like it’s not maybe all on TV, but you can’t absolutely build a buy to just run on TV.
So you can select and specify the device that you want to run on. It will lower your audience. It
will increase your CPMs. But if I’m running streaming as a true TV extension, a true broadcast extension,
there’s absolutely cases where I would just run TV device only.
You know, the other thing that you need to look at is if you’re running TV only, you should be seeing
about a 95% completion rate on your video. If you’re seeing lower completion rates, like 60, 70%,
I’ll, you know, good portion of that inventory is probably on a mobile device. So that’s one way to,
you know, if you did, if you don’t know the details of that by, you know, maybe you’re the CEO versus
the media buyer, you know, that’s a good way to kind of identify like where your your ads are
running based off of that completion rate. Yeah, so a little tip there, completion rate under 95%
red flag, you’re probably running on non TV devices. Yeah, and not red flag like you have a bad buy,
but just you’re maybe not buying what you thought you were buying. You know, and then I think
just knowing what you’re buying, it’s not just a line I’m on the plan, just like you probably
don’t have a line on your plan that just says TV, $100,000, right? You know, it’s, here’s the check.
It’s excite, you know, it’s the, the NBC affiliate, the ABC affiliate, the Fox affiliate, like where
are you running? There are some limitations with where you’re running with streaming. So you can’t
get shows specific. I’m not going in and buying, you know, dancing with the stars only when it comes
to streaming. And it’s typically publisher. Well, first, first and foremost is audience based, right?
So we’re saying we don’t care as much where audience is, as long as I’m reaching millennial
parents in the Dallas DMA, I don’t care where they’re watching it. That’s typically how we would go
in and buy streaming. And then we put some quality control on it in terms of the TV device only,
or the, you know, full episode player content. Well, wait, hang on, hang on. Let’s unpack that a little
bit more. So it sounds like one of the major benefits of buying stream streaming TV is I can go
target an audience based on something beyond just demographic or content, like, like we’re
limited to within broadcast TV. Yeah, you can, but on a local level, if you overtarget, you risk not
reaching enough people. So we’re still trying to use streaming in most cases as kind of this brand
awareness, you know, premium kind of content play. And then we overtarget so much that we serve
minimal impressions. Oh, but just just humor me. Give me some examples of some audience targeting I
can do with streaming. I mean, can I target somebody who just maybe went into a competing attraction,
went to the zoo, and I’m the aquarium? You can, but on a local level, you’re probably going to get
very, very little inventory. You could run those little, like, a couple hundred dollars
against that. And you might say that’s fine. I don’t care. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to
reach enough people to actually drive visitation into our parks. And I would say the better play to do
that type of targeting would be, and maybe some of our social channels, other digital, like online video,
where your reach is going to be much higher than just streaming specifically. So is this one of
those just because you can, doesn’t mean you should exactly. And there are places where that makes
sense within a media plan within a digital buy, but probably not how you want to target, you know,
your streaming video. Okay. So this sounds great. I’d like to carve off all my broadcast TV budget and
move it to Netflix. Not happening for a local advertiser. What can I buy? So I know kind of the other
big hype over the last year. So has been, you know, the fact that Netflix and Disney plus and Hulu are
Hulu, sorry HBO, which is now max have all started introducing kind of a lower tier ad supported plan.
I’m kind of, you know, very much mimicking kind of how Hulu has done it. The problem with all these
is just on a local level, there are not enough subscribers to go and adjust to a buy only on that.
If you’re buying multiple markets, this might make sense. Or if you’re buying kind of a little bit
of everything is makes sense, but this is not how I would recommend setting up a buy for a local
nonprofit attraction. How I would look at going in and setting up a buy is if you’re going to carve off
like that one premium publisher, it’s Hulu. Hulu by far is going to be the best. I mean, if you can go
back to that gauge report, it’s number two behind, well, it’s actually number three. So it’s YouTube,
Netflix, Hulu. And YouTube’s not real TV. Correct. Netflix, we can’t do locally. Right. So who’s
going to be our number one publisher that we can actually go in and do a local ad buy on?
So I would look at it as Hulu, kind of, I would bucket that as its own because
chances are, you know, I do want to hit an audience watching Hulu in a market. And then my kind of
next year would be all other premium publishers kind of blended. So my paramounts, my P-cox,
you know, the, even like our fast TV, our free ad support TV like Samsung and things like that.
Like those can all be, that’s all online streaming content where we can include full episode
player, 22 minute inventory. So I’d bucket all of that together because every market is going to
vary and you know, I have a few people on each one of these, you know, different platforms. So I
want to group them all together first trying to do like a dedicated buy on every single one because
this, you’re not giving it any room to actually kind of optimize across all these different
publishers if you were to break each one out individually. What kind of CPMs are we talking about
with Hulu? Hulu can be kind of closer to that $30 range and then our sort of second tier sort
of in between that $20 and $30 range. And you know, all of this varies based off of the type of
targeting the size of the market and then the time of the year because it’s really kind of follows
broadcast if you think about that because the more targeted you are, the higher your CPMs are going to
be, the more, you know, in broadcasts we’d think about more in terms of like the least amount of
shows or day parts that we buy, probably the higher CPMs are going to be. And then the, you know,
quarter by quarter, the rates are going to vary with holiday, of course, being our most expensive time,
particularly for streaming. So it sounds like if I’ve got to buy a streaming TV by, and I’d just
align on them on my plan and I really have no idea where it’s running and I’m getting CPMs in the $12
range. I’m probably not getting real TV. Yeah, it’s probably limited in terms of the, you may be like 50%
of that inventory is running on TV screens. You know, maybe half of it is actually that full episode
content. I’d question, it’s not that it’s bad, but like I’d put that in that sort of like third tier
bucket of kind of can run anywhere everywhere we don’t care. But I, if you’re not kind of looking at
it this way, chances are everything is running in that third tier. And it’s, you know, you’re just not
aligning it with that premium content that you think you’re aligned with. Yeah, it could be a little scary.
Yeah, I think especially for like a nonprofit attraction, like where you run is really important.
And I think with the, you know, with the changes in technology with, you know, the introduction
of programmatic media across virtually every channel that we can buy in now, it’s so great because
we can focus on the audience and not the placement. But for a lot of advertisers, the placement
still really matters. And, you know, I would argue that you always kind of want a blend of, you know,
premium high quality with maybe more audience targeting less concern everywhere it’s running. But
if everything that you have is we have no idea where it’s running and who cares is just the audience.
I mean, kind of think about nonprofit attractions. There’s, it’s more than just a performance-based
strategy, right? So we’re not just trying to drive like the lowest, you know, cost per conversion
on the website for, you know, a ticket sale because a lot of people are so walking up and buying
tickets. So most of what we run, we can’t even track down to that. But I think this is just where like,
you know, we do care or, you know, nonprofit attractions do care about where they’re ads running.
Because when we’re talking about it, like, especially if it’s a mission-based message, like, we want that,
you know, to be aligned in the right content so that someone’s in the right mindset when they’re
receiving that message and actually wants to go and take action. So it’s, it’s important to know
where your ads running. We shouldn’t just be so concerned. Like, don’t worry about where it’s running.
It’s just about the audience. I don’t think that’s true for, for this particular industry.
And I think for a lot of industries, it’s, that’s something that you’ve got to balance both sides of it.
Okay, so kind of recap. Hulu, a $30 CPM can creep up closer to $40 CPM during kind of peak demand,
Q4 holiday, Paramount, Peacock, maybe about a $20 to $30 CPM, and then your next tier down is fast,
free as supported TV. This is your Samsung TV, your Pluto, maybe about a $20 CPM. Give or take a
little bit. Is that sound about right? Yeah, all the base of markets too. And if you’re getting a
streaming quote unquote, real TV by where CPMs are coming below $20 CPM, that’s an opportunity to
question where exactly that inventory is running. Exactly. Yeah. What’s the device breakout in terms
of the percentage on each device, those types of things. All right. So let’s recap all of this.
What are the three things you want folks to walk away with?
We’re not, not quite yet abandoning broadcast, right? It’s still a viable
channel that we should be looking at for our media mix. But we are looking at shifting our
dollars as our audience shifts, right? So younger audiences more to streaming.
But we’re not walking away from broadcast quite yet. And number two.
Look at TV and online video differently. So our streaming is the one one kind of TV bucket that
is technically not just TV. So know what you’re buying and you know, break those two things out.
Yeah. And then once again, that $20 to $40 CPM range is what we should expect for streaming on real TV.
Correct. And number three. Well, when we say know what you’re buying, we also, you should have,
you know, transparency in that by. So what am I buying on Hulu? What percentage is going on some of
these premium publishers? What list makes up the premium publishers? Ask these questions.
Make sure that you have this going into a buy. And then of course you can always get reporting
back by publisher and device for everything you run. Keep in mind, you cannot get show level reporting.
In, you know, most cases, maybe some of the publishers direct you can, but it’s pretty difficult to get
still. Jenny, thanks. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast.
If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show,
please visit our website at MarketingAttractionsPodcast.com.