Published June 1
As the collective world’s attention fractures, so are advertising dollars. TV’s moat has always been the massive reach it offers, but to keep pace with the tech heavyweights, it now must show proof that brands’ ads are working.
The industry is in the early phases of moving towards outcomes, which analyst Karsten Weide recently called “the most consequential structural change in the upfronts in a generation," in an op-ed for The Current.
Outcomes permeated the pitches of all the top companies, being a core tenet of virtually every upfronts presentation, from NBCUniversal to Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery.
“The expectation for all of the platforms is to realize that the competition is everywhere at this point, and a lot of them are proving out the impact of a buy,” Wpromote’s Vice President of Media Investment, Deanna Cullen, said. “And so if we’re not talking about the proof points in our presentations, the expectation is that there are none.”
On this special video edition of The Current Report, we dive into what outcomes mean practically, why they’re on the top of every marketer’s mind and the roadmap to actually making them happen.
“Over the course of the last year, we’ve definitely seen this move from sort of discussion point to more of a negotiation point,” Sam Lewis, Senior Vice President of Creative & Media at DEPT, said. “There’s more of an expectation to be linking to real commercial performance and to be able to prove that, than just sort of experimentation around it. But it is remaining somewhat tricky to put it all together as one connected ecosystem.”