David Berkowitz

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Isabella Simonetti (gifted link below) reveals that TV networks are embracing their aging viewership and challenging the notion that younger demographics are the most valuable targets for advertisers. With the median age of viewers now in their 50s and 60s (MTV viewers average 51 years old!) for many networks, executives argue that reaching consumers based on their purchasing habits, rather than age, is the key to effective advertising. Older viewers often have more disposable income, are less sensitive to price increases, and are still making brand decisions. By focusing on the mass-market reach of TV and targeting people likely to buy a product, regardless of age, media buyers are adapting to the changing landscape of television viewership. As media and entertainment professionals, it's crucial to recognize the importance of this demographic shift and adapt our approaches accordingly. What do you think about this? #advertising #consumerhabits #mediastrategies #mediaproduction

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We are celebrating 10 years of IAB Tech Lab at the #IABTechLab Summit today & tomorrow! Past & current IAB Tech Lab leaders — Scott Cunningham, Alanna Laforet, Dennis Buchheim, and Anthony Katsur — reminisce with Shailley Singh about developing the foundational #adtech #standards and #specs for our #digital #advertising & #media industry and building a #global #community! From taking over the original #technical #standards from IAB to developing new initiatives such as #OpenRTB, #OpenMeasurement, ads.txt, #VAST, #AdvancedTV and #CTV initiatives, #Privacy Enhancing Technologies #PETs, and many other Tech Lab accomplishments. #Kudos to the whole #IABTechLab Team - past and current - over this past decade! #AdStandards #AdTech #CookieDeprecation #Grits #Service #Teamwork

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🚀 New Episode Alert on SmallBiz Summit: Becoming "Zip Code Famous" with CTV Advertising featuring Frank Felker 📺 Join us as Frank Felker, a seasoned marketing strategist, delves into the power of Connected TV advertising for local businesses. This episode is a treasure trove for any local business looking to enhance brand visibility and target customers right in their own neighborhoods. Frank discusses the importance of geo-focused advertising and how to capitalize on "golden nugget neighborhoods" to maximize ROI. This targeted approach differs markedly from broad-scale strategies, offering local businesses a more effective way to penetrate their most lucrative markets. 🌍💡 👍 Don't miss out on strategic insights that could transform your local advertising efforts. Listen to the Full Episode https://sbu2.com/3ydlW4n

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This development highlights the ongoing challenges faced by subscription streaming services in balancing profitability and regional pricing policies with global consumer behavior. Read the full article: ▸ https://lttr.ai/AUvNy #subscription #subscriptionbusiness #YouTube #streaming #Google #subscriptionmodel #subscriptioneconomy #news

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Brit Morin, Jessica E. Lessin, Sam Lessin and Dave Morin had a really interesting conversation on a podcast this week about media businesses, the tribulations of the The Washington Post and how it's losing piles of money and subs. The discussion dipped into something Chris Anderson coined 20 years ago, perhaps before their time, called "long tail" content. Essentially his thesis called on creators to hyper-focus only on their niche, becoming the expert in hacking heat pumps or the best practices of dog grooming. Now, I'm one of those always looking to appeal to the broadest audience possible so naturally I've pushed against this framework, considering it too limiting. Then I met and worked under Robert Allbritton at POLITICO, where in spite of many in the company not on board with the philosophy, he talked about starting the company to deliver value to a sliver of the audience: those most powerful in the halls of government and soup of politics (and charge significant money for it). Needless to say it was a winning approach, because it's unlikely Axel Springer paid a billion dollars a few years ago for the ad-supported general news side of the house - as terrific as that content is. It was the subscription "Pro" product that overdelivered to that wonky sliver. And while the chatters on the pod did not say so, a similar strategy could well work for the Post: Turn 80% of the operation toward finding a little white space in the "political and policy makers" space, and become an absolute authority there ... and then, of course, license all that to the LLMs ;-) (But that's a story for another post.)

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A welcome reminder on the limitations of programmatic advertising despite its incredibly widespread use. The lack of transparency regarding where ads are displayed and the quality of placements remains a significant issue. Also, programmatic platforms may not always ensure brand safety, with ads appearing alongside inappropriate or harmful content. On top of that, relying solely on programmatic channels can limit the control advertisers have over ad placements and targeting parameters. And this is before we get to the demise of the 3rd party cookie. Interesting article to read and not surprised Bloomberg switched to a clean, direct-sold model. #DigitalAdvertising #Programmatic #Monetisation #OnlineAdvertising

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The amount of scam websites out there grows by the day—and what's particularly frustrating is that social media and search engines are taking the scammers' money without performing due diligence, enabling them to amplify their bad goods to consumers far and wide. I suggest you show your displeasure (On the open web, premium publishers and the adtech infrastructure are also getting played—but that's because of cloaking technology.)

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What are the 4 words Lou Paskalis uses to explain the "Brand vs Performance" debate? It's a whirlwind of wisdom from a true #marketing Hall-of-Famer on The Snarketing Podcast. The Chief Strategy Officer at Ad Fontes Media and former American Express, Bank of America & Gallo Wine Company exec joined Valerie Vespa and me before the POSSIBLE conference to opine on: 🤝 Unified marketing strategies, 🌐 Balancing automation with human expertise, 🛠️ Creator evolution, 📰 News and marketing, ⏰ Rapid SaaS launches, 🎭 Crafting a narrative, 🏦 Trust in banking, and yes, 🤔 The only 4 words you need to know about brand vs performance. 𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘: https://lnkd.in/eXNCqp9e

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I’m intrigued by announcements at The Washington Post this week. Less about the use of AI - a standard boilerplate for a media restructure in 2024 (although that will be interesting to see the detail). It’s the ‘splitting’ of the newsroom with a new Service/Social area as an audience engagement play and cutting the content for audiences they either aren’t, or currently not focused on, reaching. WAPO already has a steady TikTok game (as a relatively early adopter) so will be watching how the structure, and subsequent output, materialises. Noted also are the ‘Flexible Payments’ as part of a subs pay structure, which is also a pragmatic way to sweat strong paywalled content to the ‘never-subs’ market (but it relies on strong and targeted journalism that is compelling enough for micropayments) https://lnkd.in/ewf6bTCy

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Been thoroughly enjoying the insights and unique perspectives that are shared in this article from Lead Marvels. 5 experts reveal their association’s unique approach to sponsored content. This time around, it’s Mark David with IEEE. This article is a must read for association professionals who are looking for ideas on how to approach sponsored content - in ways that not only grow non-dues revenue, but also adds value to members and aligns with their organizational mission. (If your association approaches sponsored content in a unique way - different from those mentioned in the article - we would love to hear about it! Drop it in the comments, or reach out!) 👇👇👇 #memberengagement #associations #noneduesrevenue #sponsoredcontent #leadgeneration

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Very insightful podcast with Les Binet on marketing effectiveness & ad pre-testing.

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We see a lot of media mix modeling RFPs here at Recast. Unfortunately, a lot of them put a ton of emphasis on things that don’t actually matter that much to rolling out a successful MMM practice. Every MMM RFP should focus on 3 things: • Verifiability of the model The first (and most important) thing that you should be thinking about is verifiability and how are you going to validate the results are actually correct. It is trivially easy to run “an MMM”, and it is very, very difficult to run a good one. You want to ask every vendor you meet how transparent are the results going to be and how –specifically– are you going to be able to verify and validate them. What you should look for here is a way to validate the vendor’s results outside of the model itself. • Model operations You also want to think about all the operational components of your MMM. Make sure you’re asking questions like: - What's the refresh cadence going to be? - How often are you actually going to be re-estimating the model and re-estimating all of the models' parameters, or are you just re-using stale parameters on fresh data? - What's the procedure for identifying when things have changed? Beware that a lot of MMM vendors use confusing terms here or have different types of refreshes that aren’t actually refreshers… put simply, you really want to be clear on exactly what's happening. • Usability of the results Here, you want to ask questions like: - How are we going to have access to the results of the model? Is it a PDF / powerpoint? What is available in the dashboard? - How will we actually use these results in our planning workflow? - What underlying data are you going to have access to? If you want to use MMM in a fast-paced, on-demand way, great usability is what unlocks it. If every time you want something you have to ask a support question and they have to ask their team in some foreign country to pull the data, it will slow you down a lot. Whether you use Recast or not, I highly recommend you ask all these questions in your MMM RFP. Now, question for you: would it be useful if we made a free MMM RFP template you could download? If so, we’ll do it. Just let me know in the comments.

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The ad industry loves to feign offense at terms like "surveillance advertising," but as I told Ryan Barwick // Marketing Brew, as Palantir Technologies pitches its AI Platform to media agencies, it's "increasingly difficult to tell where one industrial complex begins and another ends." I've said it once, and I'll say it again: maybe surveillance and coercion isn't an effective way to build authentic connections with consumers. https://lnkd.in/dbvAbqvm #privacy #surveillanceadvertising #dataethics

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Food for thought - AI WILL impact your brand reputation. "To protect and strengthen brand reputation in an AI world, corporate and brand communications leaders need to start monitoring and influencing AI-powered answer engines and the large language models that underpin them." My colleague Brian Snyder authored this piece discussing AI reputation management and what brands should consider in the new AI era. Give it a read - you won't be disappointed. If you have questions or would like to discuss further, DM me! #AI #technology #brand #reputation

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Generative AI and conversational AI employ very different techniques, have differentiated use cases, and pose unique challenges. 🧠 Start with a foundational understanding of two of the most popular types of #AI for businesses, and see which one (if not both) is right for your business. Read more in Verse.ai's latest blog: https://lnkd.in/gYFpd_ZT #generativeAI #conversationalAI

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As Seb Joseph points out in this latest piece in Digiday, the same publishers purchased through TRUSTX are 50% more environmentally friendly than they would be if purchased through other supply-side platforms, as audited by Scope3. But it's not because we have less carbon-heavy MFA inventory than other SSPs. It's because we don't have any. Never have. Never will. Zero MFA, ever. It's not easy being green. But it is worth it.

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Marketing agencies are a critical part of the CMO's team. I spoke with Drew McLellan of the Agency Management Institute on building the ideal agency-CMO relationship in this podcast, https://lnkd.in/gqcSW9uu. I shared: ► What agencies don’t understand about the CMO role ► Getting out of the competition mindset against other agencies ► What a CMO wants from an agency-CMO relationship ► The difference between an agency that gets recommended by a CMO and ones who don’t ► How AI is changing the world from a CMO’s perspective ► Should agencies be trying to experiment with AI for clients? ► How AI will change the CMO role in the future ► How agencies can help CMOs do their jobs better Eager to here your thoughts. #MarketingAgency #CMO #AIinMarketing GrowthPath Partners

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My latest article on CMSWire asks CMOs, CEOs, and hiring agencies if industry experience is necessary or overrated. The deeper question I'm getting at here is: are too many great CMO candidates not even getting interviewed because they lack prior industry knowledge? Share your thoughts! Thanks to Sue Keith, Club CMO, Eric Pairitz, James (JD) Dillon, Doug Zarkin and Gaurav Bhatia for being a source! #cmo #marketing #humanresources

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