During a roundtable discussion for the Variety Streaming Room, presented by MNTN, titled “TV Ads 2.0: How the Connected Age Gives TV Advertising A Second Life,” television executives talked at length about how their jobs have evolved in light of viewer attention gravitating toward streaming services and further away from traditional broadcast TV.
Television executives Andrea Zapata, Executive Vice President of Ad Sales Research, Measurement and Insights for Warner Brothers Discovery; Mark Douglas, President and CEO of MNTN; Dan Callahan, Senior VP of Data Strategy and Sales Innovation for Fox; Kristen O’Hara, Vice President of Agency and Brand Solutions for Google and YouTube; Matt Sweeney, Chief Investment Officer at Group M; and John Lee, Chief Data Officer for Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, joined Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton for a conversation that covered topics like advertising-supported video on demand, streaming television and more.
On the topic of the brand advertising market, Douglas offered a frank perspective on where the industry currently is, saying: “The amount spent by brand advertisers is not growing, but the amount of inventory is growing substantially. So the only way around that is to bring more advertisers into the market, because if we just focus on more inventory from the same advertisers, there are going to have to be winners and losers.”
With advertising itself, O’Hara remarked that emotional gravitation is still what marks a successful advertisement above anything else.
“One of the things that we have seen in research we’ve done recently is on the notion of telling great stories. That’s four times more important to viewers than any sort of predictability in terms of scheduling, or cadence, or structure,” O’Hara said. “It’s all about just whether it resonates or not, and it’s what’s capturing the hearts and minds of people?”
