Management Summary

Some key takeouts

Shifts in media

Our experts see a real threat to local and regional media companies from global platforms with huge content budgets, scalable businesses, and worldwide distribution.

Mergers are creating global media giants that present a very real challenge. The threat to ad-funded media from the ‘subscription culture’ these players have created is real, especially when combined with consumer frustration with poor execution and excessive advertising.

There is no consensus about whether subscription-funded media will become the predominant media type. Some of our experts predict a resurgence of ad-funded media and specifically AVOD as consumers reappraise increasing subscription fees. Others argue that services like Netflix will inevitably adopt hybrid ad-funded models to diversify revenue streams, anticipating that subscriptions will augment rather than replace ad revenue.

There was some debate as to the relevance of ‘reach’ as a concept as we move to more advanced media planning and newer KPIs more focused upon performance and actual outcomes.

The pandemic has accelerated the enthusiasm of brands to leverage their own data to communicate and transact direct with their customers. There has been a tendency in recent years to portray first-party data as a ‘magic bullet’ for brands. Certainly, our experts recognize its potential, but to truly unleash its value requires effort and investment.

Future-forward audience measurement

Our expert panel confirms that media measurement has a key role to play in addressing this potential crisis of reach, providing accurate reach and frequency figures across all platforms. To remain relevant, panels will need access to census data to measure increasingly fragmented audiences. The major topics of debate were:

Concerns about the decline in live TV viewing can be partly offset by the targeting opportunities offered to broadcasters with user data facilitating a closer viewer relationship. Online targeted approaches are more complex and require more expertise from planners - plus, campaigns are harder to track. As a result, our panel believes linear TV will remain a vital building block of reach for years to come.

The demise of the cookie will offer renewed relevance to the role of fully-consented audience panels in measuring reach across platforms and devices.

The demise of the cookie is also driving the heightened importance of first party data. The complexity of dealing with first party data, and the investment required to do it properly should not be underestimated. Also, the power of customer data is limited unless it is combined with other first-party data, such as broadcaster data. As a result, our panel anticipates that research companies will have a growing role in auditing first-party data as well as gathering their own data.

On the plus side, our panel confirmed that the potential crisis of reach and its measurement has led to a greater willingness of advertisers to take a more proactive role in measurement solutions.

Overall, there was cautious optimism that, whilst achieving reach is becoming ever more complex, the challenge can be met