Media Researchers: Politics Ruins Everything, Including Media Research

Media Researchers: Politics Ruins Everything, Including Media Research

by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese,

Public perception about the inaccuracy of political polling during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections has contributed to a crisis of confidence for the survey-based research industry, especially media researchers, a roundtable of industry experts said Monday.

The roundtable, organized by media research vets Tim Brooks and Charlene Weisler as part of an ongoing series of “media insights salons,” can be viewed in its entirety below, but the consensus was that negative attention surrounding the accuracy of political polling, has exacerbated concerns about media research in general.

Coming at a time when many in marketing and media already have begun moving away from survey-based research in favor of data science, as well as concerns that the efficacy of surveys has also deteriorated due to changes in the way surveys are conducted, especially the volume and ubiquity of them, the experts said.

“If we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it is that politics ruins everything,” quipped Betsy Frank, former research chief at Time Inc., Viacom, Zenith and other organizations, acknowledging that public perceptions have been tarnished. She blamed the news media, in part, for their coverage of political polling pre- and post the elections, but also acknowledged that the environment surrounding survey-based research has fundamentally changed, and that other methods -- including observational methods, or biometric techniques -- may be part of a longer term solution for measuring media.

“What’s happened now is the cynicism that we’ve seen in politics now has spilled over,” concurred Jack Wakshlag, former head of research at Turner, WB, CBS and currently an advisor to Simulmedia, adding, “There’s a decline in trust.”

Wakshlag noted there have always been issues with how survey-based research has been conducted, especially ensuring that they used proper sample sizes and representative ones, but he implied that many organizations have been let standards slide and that has contributed to a loss of confidence about research science overall.

He suggested some of the problems with sample representation -- including political polls -- could be offset by utilizing sample weighting techniques to compensate for the under-representation of key segments. That is one of the factors many researchers attributed to the inaccuracy of political polls in 2016 and 2020, because so-called “shy Trump supporters” may have been reluctant to participate in polls, or if they did, to give accurate answers about their voting plans.

Wakshlag noted that weighting has been an integral part of media research for decades, including panel-based research such as Nielsen’s, which has used weights to adjust for the under-representation of certain demographics, especially hard to reach ones.

Brooks, former research chief at Lifetime, USA Networks, and legendary ad agency N.W. Ayer, added that part of the problem with survey research is that methods have changed from the simple days of diary-based panel surveys and random-digital-dialing telephone surveys to online polls, which virtually anyone and everyone can conduct.

That latter point was something Paul Donato, Chief Research Officer of the Advertising Research Foundation, and Nielsen before that, said may be negatively impacting the quality of survey research, noting that many consumers -- especially those who were stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic -- may have become professional survey-takers in order to make a little money on the side from researchers and pollsters.

Donato said he doesn’t have any hard numbers to say exactly how much the survey universe has grown, but he noted that “response rates” for many forms of formal industry research soared during the pandemic, which is an indication that consumer behavior changed -- at least for a period of time -- during the pandemic.

Long-term, Donato suggested the best possible method of the media and marketing research industry might be a combination of techniques, including well-conceived and maintained panels that can control for the representation of various consumers, as well as data analytic methods that could be used to benchmark, and adjust each other.

He described this as a “proper balance between a well-curated panel and machine-curated data, and said that utilizing the two processes simultaneously would lead to the best “scientific combination” of research and data science.

 

Letting Consumers Take Control of The Ads They See. An Interview with Joe Mandese.

As consumers take more control of who they allow into their viewing space, advertisers will have to be more cognizant of how their ads are delivered and received. Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost, has been working on an initiative called Bid/r which has the potential to change the ad delivery dynamic. 

Charlene Weisler: Over the next three years, what are the greatest changes facing the ad community?

Joe Mandese: Nigel Morris, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network, when asked the same question a few years ago, said, “The problem is we’ve shifted from an era of information scarcity to one of information ubiquity.” He meant that advertising originally evolved in a world of finite media options -- a handful of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio options -- where big advertisers and agencies had the leverage of their ad budgets to efficiently buy people’s attention. If you had enough money you could buy enough reach and frequency to scale people’s attention.

That started to break down with the explosion of media options in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to multichannel television. Today, literally every single human being on the planet is a media channel. The supply of media options is virtually unlimited. The signal-to-noise ratio between consumers and brands has grown out of whack, and to paraphrase Nigel Morris, we’ve shifted from a time when there was a scarcity of media to one when there’s a scarcity of human attention.

Weisler: What is Bid/r?

Mandese: Bid/r is a marketplace where brands can bid directly for a finite supply of the most valuable consumer attention: attention consumers want to pay to a brand.  Users download a simple app to “list” themselves on an exchange where they receive offers directly from brands. There is a cap on the amount of “inventory” they can trade to five minutes daily, because we want both consumers and brands to understand the scarcity and value of their attention. Consumers are in total control of their trades and brands only pay when the consumer fulfills 100% of the terms of the trade.

Brands can offer anything they want to win the user’s attention: samples, swag, unique experiences, access to media content, even cash and for any action they want the consumer to complete, not just paying attention to an ad, but higher order functions like visiting a brand’s site, downloading information, sampling a product, participating in research, enrolling in a loyalty program, etc.

From a consumer’s perspective, it’s like Tinder for brands. They see a feed of potential brands and swipe left or right depending on which ones they actually want to engage with. From a brand’s point-of-view, they might be looking to have a first date with a consumer or build a long-term, lasting relationship.

Weisler: Can the industry solve for ad blocking? For fraud? For viewability?

Mandese: Of course, but it comes down to defining what the industry means by “ad blocking,” “fraud” and “viewability.” Depending on how you define them, all of those problems have always existed for the advertising industry.

People have always had the ability -- with a few exceptions -- of controlling what ads they see or not. I used to quip that print media like newspapers and magazines were the original digital interactive media. If you saw an ad you didn’t like, you flipped the page. I remember seeing Brian Monahan (formerly at Walmart and now at Pinterest) present data on TV commercial zapping and said, “The biggest threat to our TV commercials is not the DVR, it’s people turning their heads.”

Right now, ad blockers are making it easier to skip ads, but we’re already seeing a new generation of anti-ad-blockers and even more recently a generation of anti-anti-ad-blockers. It’s as if the ad industry has entered into a rapidly escalating arms race with its own consumers.

Same with fraud. We have new jargon like “non-human traffic” or “non-viewable impressions,” but those behaviors always existed and it was just a question of how -- and how much -- they happened, not whether they happened. When I started covering the business, agencies had virtual armies of ad checkers to handle “discrepancy resolutions” for ads they were being charged for that never aired or aired in the wrong way. Those problems have always existed, and if anything, technology has made it easier for brands and agencies to detect them.

There are a number of promising blockchain technologies that will likely help, but it’s all premised on advertisers and agencies defining exactly what they want -- and don’t want -- and communicating it clearly as part of their contracts with the media.

Weisler: What metrics do you think are the most important indicator of a successful ad campaign?

Mandese: It comes down to what a brand and agency are trying to achieve with their ad campaign. It can be multiple things -- exposure, engagement, action, etc. -- but ultimately, they have to focus on one key indicator they use to measure performance.

I’m a big fan of time-spent and duration metrics, not just because it’s what Bid/r is premised on, but because I think it’s the best way to measure if a user was actually engaged with the ad campaign. What that duration should be, is up to different stakeholders -- brands, agencies, media, and yes, even consumers -- to hash out, but I think the time of using simple impressions or exposure-based metrics is over.

I think the Media Rating Council’s (MRC’s) new “digital audience-based measurement standards,” and the fact that they are duration-weighted, is a step in the right direction, because it creates an even playing field for all stakeholders participating in a measurement method that they all agree to. But ultimately, they have to agree about what they’re agreeing to measure.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Note:  Jack Myers and Charlene Weisler are both investors in Bid/r.  Joe Mandese was the editor of The Myers Report newsletter, the forerunner to MediaVillage.

Want to Find Out What You/r Really Worth?

I am re-posting Joe Mandese's article from Media Village on my blog here to help encourage enrollment in this fascinating project. Please consider joining.

Ten years ago, Joe Marchese and I collaborated on a special edition of MEDIA magazine exploring a single question:  Was advertising a mistake?  The idea was that the ad model that emerged after World War II was based on a scarcity of media that, increasingly, no longer existed -- and that a new model needed to emerge based on a new form of scarcity: the time and attention people spend with media.

Marchese had just launched an ambitious venture enabling brands to reward consumers that gave them their attention.  Ten years later, Fox acquired Marchese’s venture -- True[x] -- named Marchese head of advertising sales and has already begun shifting from an ad impressions-based model to one based on the quality and duration of time consumers spend with Fox’s shows and the brands that advertise on them.

Marchese helped solve the problem from the industry’s perspective.  I was inspired to try and solve it from the consumer’s point-of-view, and began developing Bid/r, a new marketplace in which consumers trade their own time and attention explicitly and transparently with brands.  With the blessing of Jack Myers, I am inviting you to be a part of the live market trial that will launch in the next few weeks.

Full disclosure:  Jack, Joe Marchese and a Who’s Who list of industry veterans are also angels backing Bid/r’s launch.  They include Dave Morgan, Andrew Susman, Alan Cohen, Russ Zingale, Sarah Faye, Ellen Oppenheim, Debbie Reichig, Mitch Oscar, Charlene Weisler, Dave Thomas, Bruce Dennler, Steve Farella, Mike Lotito and David Verklin.

Bid/r wouldn’t be launching now if it wasn’t for their support.  It won’t get much past that point if we don’t get the support of people like you.  That’s because Bid/r is a people-powered marketplace that depends on people trading something -- their own time and attention -- with others willing to give them something for it: brand marketers.

So what’s in it for you to participate in the market trial?

Well, aside from the goodwill of helping me, my partner Hagen Wenzek, our angels and advisors such as Brian Monahan, Carl Marci, Bob DeSena, Bryan Wiener, Marc Guldimann and Josh Engroff, you’ll help shape a marketplace people have been attempting to crack the code on for as long as people have been talking about the “attention economy.”

Beyond that, you’ll get a “listing” on an exchange controlled 100% by you and five minutes of “inventory” each day to trade with brands offering you explicit values -- samples, swag, content, experiences, even cash -- to trade it with them.

Many of the bids you’ll receive in your “bid feed” will be things you can find in the real world, but over time you’ll see some unique, interesting and valuable bids coming directly from brands targeting users on Bid/r.  These are the trades we’re most excited about testing, because in some cases they will be forms of value exchange that have never been explored between consumers and brands before.

The goal of the market trial is to prove Bid/r’s model -- a direct-to-consumer audience exchange based on people trading themselves like an equity -- works and to refine and improve it over time.
The market trial will last for two months.  Users can only trade up to five minutes of time daily.
We are only accepting 1,000 users for the trial, so please go to www.bid-r.com/installation and list yourself now.

The experience won’t be perfect, but with your help and feedback, Bid/r will become a marketplace based on the value of you.  So sign up and find out what you/r really worth.

A Look at the Upfront Now and in the Future.

The upfront is just getting started and already there are prognosticators reporting that the decline in revenue will continue from last year. Wayne Friedman, Mediapost West Coast Editor, who moderated the first panel at the recent Outfront, wondered “whether or not we are in a new upfront paradigm. Are we on verge of perhaps two consecutive upfronts where there has been declining volume? In the past 25 years only four seasons had spending declines. Each one rebounded the following year.’ 

But what about this year? Will the declines continue and if so, what does that mean for the business? It seems to me that it all comes down to consumer behavior and fragmentation of platforms. If devices continue to offer consumers more on-demand content choices and the television technology – VOD, connected TV, OTT - continues to increase in both distribution and adoption, the business opportunity for selling traditional television in the old upfront model will inevitably shrink and need to change to a model that fully captures cross platform and digital …. in as close to real time as possible. That means currency cross platform measurement, dynamic ad insertion and maybe real time bidding. This could keep a traditional media executive awake at night.

Friedman asked each of his panelists what discussions they were having with their clients. Helen Giles, Director National Broadcast and Video Integration at Lowe Campbell Ewald said, “We look at look at individual client needs and where the audience is.” Chris Geraci, President National Broadcast Investment at OMD agreed, “We always start with the clients. We look at media as video and have an agnostic approach to it. Video is now consumed on more diverse array of platforms than ever before.” 

Some were weighing the value of buying in the upfront.  “What if I didn't do the upfront?” said Jason Kanefsky, EVP Strategic Investments for Havas Media, “We have this discussion at Havas. What is my ceiling for price and what is my alternative? It used to be the idea of the fear of being shut out. And that fear is what has driven the market. Fragmentation makes us less fearful.” Maureen Bosetti, EVP Group Director National Broadcast and NY Operations for Optimedia posited, “What is the value we can yield from the upfront? Is it the best programming and the flexibility? Why are we in the upfront?” And Gibbs Haljun, Managing Director Media Investment for GroupM noted that, “The upfronts is the futures market. It depends on what are we doing from a brand and client perspective. Many investments are being done closer to lead time. But it is based on individual clients.”

That is now. Looking forward five years to Upfront 2019-2020 and there was little consensus as to what to expect. Barry Lowenthal, President of Media Kitchen, see programmatic as the future. “We have been bullish on programmatic and took back from our trading desk to do programmatic all by ourselves. It is the very center of what we do. The best insights come from data driven media buying.” However Kris Magel, Chief Investment Officer, Initiative is less convinced. He said, “Programmatic is overused.” And Adam Kasper, Chief Media Officer, Havas Media sees a sea change going forward. “It is incrementally different this year. We are shifting from traditional to digital and it is an important shift. Are upfront commitments necessary? I am not sure it will be I existence in five years. Maybe we will go directly to content creators.” Kasper also saw, a “revolution coming in the measurement space.”

It is difficult to make any forecast in this turgid media environment but if agency executives are questioning the future of Upfront as we know it, it is certain to change in a meaningful way. As Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief for Mediapost said, “We have reached an inflection point where things really are different.” How different still remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Thsi article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com