I’m going to start this week’s newsletter by saying that the title of this is a world class, A+ dad joke. It’s pretty clever and you didn’t think of it, so just lean back and enjoy it.
I don’t have a cable subscription.
And to be honest, I don’t think I miss it. Sure, I miss aimlessly flipping around the guide to find something to watch, because that’s a pastime and an art of its own. But when I was a kid and I sat down on 9pm on Thursday night, for instance, I knew I was watching The Lucy and Desi Hour*. But the only appointment viewing that I have today is live sports. And forget about my kids. I’m not even sure they know what I mean when I say “I’m going to watch something on TV”.
*LOL, wouldn’t it be funny if I were actually this old? Cheers. I watched Cheers at 9pm on Thursdays when I was a kid
At first, it was largely a function of having to maintain two separate Wi-Fis for two separate places and being too cheap to spring for the full Monty as it were. But it pretty quickly became a “why would I spend $200 a month on this dreck?”
Two things:
First, if I actually did the economics, I’m nearly certain that I’m spending as much on streaming services as I would be on a single cable subscription, perhaps more. I haven’t done the math*, but I think this is the case. I’m also certain that of the streaming services that I do have (that I have mainly because of the job that I do for living**) - Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Max, Disney+, ESPN+, Amazon Prime and Peacock - I watch 2-3 of them semi-daily, 2-3 of them semi-monthly and a couple of them very rarely (like they have one show on them that I’ll binge or catch weekly when in season and then completely forget about).
*In addition to being reasonably cheap, I’m also extraordinarily lazy
**Reminder that I do *this* wonderful newsletter work for free. You’re welcome
Second, there’s an elegance and efficiency to having one central cable subscription that I miss. And let’s face it: there’s so much on “TV”* that most of the time I’m so overwhelmed by choice that I just default to something that I’ve already watched or something so mindless (looking at you, Big Bang Theory) that I don’t really have to pay attention. It’s the equivalent of staring at the wall.
But CTV has a problem - a big problem - and it’s been a problem since the beginning and it’ll remain a problem until everyone comes together to do something about it. It’s an ad frequency and data availability problem.
Oh, it’s not necessarily a problem for them, the data thing especially. That’s what the industry calls “a differentiator.” It’s a problem for you.
The streaming services that you subscribe to know everything that you’ve told them (actively or passively) - where you live, what you like to watch, how often you watch, etc. - and they use that information to do a lot of things like tell the market how attractive their audience is and how much disposable income you have. They also use it to (theoretically) deliver you advertising relevant to your interests and desires.
But do they?
I mean, I guess? In the broadest definition they do, but they do it without any effective regard for anything that could be considered managing frequency or message fatigue for that matter. When I worked at FreeWheel some years ago, I took calls nearly every day that the ad server wasn’t managing frequency properly and that some exec at some company was watching some bit of prestige content on their CTV app and that they saw the same ad twice in a pod and that heads were going to roll. Do people make those calls anymore? Do people take them? I’m not sure they do because there are some ads that I see so often* that I have to assume they have a reach of 1 and a frequency of 5 bajillion. Which is still a pretty good GRP, I guess.
*You’re officially on notice, Burger King. If you really want me to have it my way, you’ll stop
But the bigger problem is that no one is sharing data with anyone else, nor are they allowing for any meaningful connection with anyone else to at least infer exposure (for instance). And in the absence of information, people begin to make things up. And in this case, they’re telling themselves that if they don’t explicitly know that you’ve seen an ad, they’ll implicitly assume you haven’t. If you want to know why you see Flo from Progressive more than you see your own mother, that’s one of the reasons*.
*Call your mother. She misses you
So CTV has an ads problem. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. 68% of the country now watches some form of CTV. It’s a larger portion of the viewership pie than broadcast TV. Around 20% of the ad spend is coming into CTV and those numbers are only going to grow from here.
There are profound and epidemic issues with CTV advertising and ad frequency is at the top of the list all day everyday. And worse, there’s doesn’t really seem to be a huge motivation to solve it, unless you include the preponderance of people who want to tell you about it in articles or newsletters (and if you think that’s a bit of a postmodern statement, you’re right).
What is the solution? There’s a few things:
A unified ID of some kind would do it, but there’s a lot of moving parts there and everyone seems to have their own ID that they want to be *the* ID and linking all of those IDs together is not only a lot of work, it’s also probably impossible.
Ad-ID is a reasonable solve here, but it’s inconsistently applied and not mandatory as part of the VAST or oRTB spec and also without Harold Geller, I’m not even sure who the champion for Ad-ID even is anymore
Demand path management would also help to some extent - if you limit the amount of entry points to your inventory, you’re limiting the amount of possible overlap. But there’s some issues with that as well. For starters, if you’re stanching the competition for ad delivery, you’re probably not getting the most money that you can get. It’s hard to find the perfect market for this stuff - what is the right amount of partners to manage the demand footprint but also make sure there’s still enough demand diversity that I don’t want to jump off a cliff when the ad break hits
There’s no silver bullet here. It’ll take some combination of these things and probably some others that I’m not thinking of, because it’s early and I haven’t had any coffee yet. But it has to be fixed somehow.
I got some really nice responses to the story that I told about my son last week. Thank you all for that. There’s a post-script here, which is that I asked him if he remembered any of that. He remembered taking the hoops class, but that was pretty much it. But he also told me that he plays basketball at school during recess sometimes now, and that he makes more than he misses, which is progress.
And so it goes.
Until next time, friends.