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The post 2024 in TV: Streamers close in on UK as broadcasters adapt first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The year in TV began as it has ended for the buy side: with an M&A frenzy, as two of the world’s biggest broadcasters entered merger talks.
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) CEO David Zaslav and Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish had reportedly met to discuss a merger.
5 reasons Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount are discussing merger
By late February, the deal was dead because WBD didn’t end up making a formal offer.
But the tone was set for the rest of the year: home internet speeds have become fast and reliable enough to enable TV to become a global game. But it’s a game increasingly dominated by international streaming businesses — Netflix, Amazon, Disney, YouTube and TikTok (if user-generated video counts).
It’s a scale that regional broadcasters can’t match. So how do they adapt to survive?
2024 showed that adapt they must, as the market continues to rapidly change.
Sky’s losses doubled last year to £224m, the pay-TV broadcaster reported in an October Companies House filing covering its full-year 2023 financials.
Sky in November revealed that it owed its advertising partners hundreds of millions of pounds after it discovered it had been under-reporting revenue to them. This dated as far back as 2017, before its acquisition by Comcast.
Later that month, chief advertising and new revenue officer Priya Dogra said Sky would “fully reimburse” its clients, which include Paramount and WBD, at Sky Media’s upfronts event.
Meanwhile, at least another potential issue has been averted: Sky has now renewed its distribution and bundle agreement WBD.
Sky failed our high standards, ads chief tells industry at upfronts
ITV — itself the subject of recent M&A speculation — expects to grow by 2.5% this year. This is despite total ad revenue declining by up to 7% in Q4 — normally the most fruitful time of year for advertising-dependent media owners.
The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster now also has a big Studios content business, but that performed even worse. Revenue at ITV Studios fell 20% to £1.2bn in the first nine months of the year.
ITV also doubled down on its now two-year-old VOD platform ITVX. In March, it announced it would sell its 50% stake in global streaming service BritBox International to joint venture partner BBC Studios for £255m.
Over at Channel 4, revenue fell by 10% in 2023 and it admitted that spending on content dropped last year and would continue to decline — confirming indie producers’ complaints this year that commissions have been all but frozen.
Channel 4 linear ad revenue down 16% after TV market recovery ‘failed to materialise’
Verica Djurdjevic’s departure as chief commercial officer was announced in July. She will be replaced by Spotify’s EMEA commercial lead, Rak Patel, who starts in January.
As for Channel 5, parent Paramount decided to rebrand it as just 5 next year as part of plans to relaunch the public-service broadcaster across linear, streaming and digital platforms under one unified name, The Media Leader revealed.
The relaunch, due to happen by April, meant Paramount will no longer merge Channel 5’s broadcaster VOD service My5 with free ad-supported TV platform Pluto TV, as was due to take place this autumn.
Channel 5 to become just ‘5’: UK PSB’s first ‘unified’ rebrand
And yet the UK’s “big three” broadcasters continued to respond to a changing market, particularly by showing they can offer joint solutions to benefit advertisers.
Freely, the streaming service backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, formally launched. It marked the first time all four UK public-service broadcasters have collaborated on a streaming proposition.
In September, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky announced a new joint measurement panel, Lantern, aimed at tracking the short-term impact of TV advertising on sales.
Whereas their existing joint venture CFlight measures deduplicated reach and frequency on linear and digital, Lantern aims to give advertisers much more information to the question “Did my TV campaign work?” by pooling data and tracking the behaviour of consumers after they were shown particular ads.
Commercial telly’s UK marketing body had a busy year too. Among Thinkbox’s highlights were the release of Profit Ability 2, which found advertising gives a short-term profit return on investment of £1.87 per £1 invested.
Advertising generates profit, but not all media channels are equal
One of the agencies involved, WPP’s EssenceMediacom, crunched the data and concluded that brands could be spending three times too much on social. TV, meanwhile, is getting less cash and credit than it deserves.
Brands could be spending three times too much on social. You read that right
As for Thinkbox — an outfit known for leading media research — it’s goodbye to long-serving research and planning director Matt Hill, who was poached by Sky Media. He replaces Lucy Bristowe, who left earlier in the year to join Kantar Media.
In December, Thinkbox announced that Hill would be effectively replaced by Wavemaker UK’s chief strategy officer Elliott Millard.
Thinkbox, like UK TV’s joint industry currency provider Barb, is part of a established TV ecosystem. Whereas this could have been a hurdle to navigate for the world’s streaming giants, 2024 spelled a new era of collaboration. Or perhaps foxes entering the henhouse.
In February, Thinkbox announced new associate members Amazon, Netflix, Vevo, WBD and Disney.
This had been coming; media agencies had been clear with the streaming providers that they need to sign up to existing structures, including Thinkbox.
The news came within weeks of Amazon Prime Video launching advertising on all programming in the UK for bottom-tier subscribers.
A Kantar Media study found that, even though Netflix and Disney+ had introduced baseline subscription options that included ads, Prime Video — which had moved its subscribers to a default ads tier — was “the only major service whose subscribers display an active net dissatisfaction with the number of ads being served”.
Amazon Prime Video sees ‘significant’ UK churn following ad tier launch
Netflix, meanwhile, said it would be expanding the number of programmatic partners for advertisers beyond its once-exclusive deal with Microsoft and developing an in-house adtech platform.
It announced Q3 revenue growth of 15%, while Netflix continues to dominate reported usage in Barb’s Establishment Survey.
It’s a significant year for the streaming giant as it prepares to live broadcast its first NFL games at Christmas. Sports rights continue to be a big preoccupation for broadcasters to defend market share, with Sky retaining the prestigious UK Premier League rights and Amazon Prime Video broadcasting Champions League football for the first time.
Elsewhere, the summer saw the UK entry of Fox’s ad-supported streaming service Tubi, which launched in the US in 2014.
Perhaps the most significant story of 2025 will be what happens to TV measurement, particularly as advertiser trade body Isba’s cross-media measurement solution Origin formally launches.
November saw the major development of a possible impasse being broken, with Barb entering talks to join Origin under a plan that would see Origin incorporate two reports with different viewability standards, The Media Leader revealed.
Plan tabled for Barb to join Origin in hybrid reporting model
The challenge for UK broadcasters, as well as lacking the scale of global players, is that the likes of tech platforms have masses of user data to offer advertisers. Barb exists to provide a baseline of measurement standards to stop advertisers being ripped off; it seems Origin will provide a choice for marketers to choose their own TV adventure.
Of course, TV was not immune from the AI hype.
ITV launched two TV ads that have been created using generative AI and wants to sell more of them to small businesses.
The future of TV ads? ITV creates two spots with generative AI
And it was also a landmark year of sort for media regulator Ofcom, which in October levied a £100,000 penalty on GB News for breaking due impartiality rules with People’s Forum: The Prime Minister, which was broadcast in February.
It was the first time Ofcom has imposed a fine on the free-to-air channel after multiple alleged infractions.
Ofcom issues first financial penalty to GB News for Rishi Sunak Q&A
Of course, the global streamers are also privileged by not having to abide by the same level of regulations as the UK’s national broadcasters. As this author noted in February, it rather feels like broadcasters are being asked to play a game with one hand tied behind their back.
Does this market have the forbearance to encourage (or even force) streamers to adopt local market customs and regulations? Or will TV become a more flexible and anarchic landscape dominated by automated trading and algorithmic content recommendations?
Stay tuned.
The post 2024 in TV: Streamers close in on UK as broadcasters adapt first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post We’re a friend to the TV market, insists Amazon ad sales VP first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>“I think the room is trying to figure out: are you a friend or a foe? So which one is it?”
Amazon Ads’ vice-president of global ad sales, Alan Moss, was asked directly whether Amazon, which this year entered the ad-supported streaming market, was willing to work with TV industry bodies and joint industry currencies (JICs) to provide transparency.
“We’re a friend,” replied Moss. “Look, everyone’s got more content choices than you ever had before. Great viewing options. I think the marketplace wins when you have more options.”
Moss was speaking in an interview with Adwanted Events director Justin Lebbon at The Future of TV Advertising Global 2024 on Wednesday.
He explained that Amazon has been trying to “thread a needle” between providing familiar measurement with third parties in the countries where it has launched its ads tier, while at the same time embracing “what makes Amazon unique — and that’s innovation”.
“As a digital streaming service, we have a lot of first-party insights we can bring, some unique measurement that we can also offer and capabilities that are really different, like shoppable ads”, said Moss. “We’ve also really wanted to lean in to the capabilities of digital and hopefully shape a bit of what TV is going to look like in the future.”
But, he added, transparency is hugely important — “We know there’s plenty of advertisers that don’t want us grading our own homework” — and the company has been open to working with JICs and industry bodies.
In the UK, Amazon joined TV JIC Barb and TV marketing body Thinkbox in February.
It has been nearly a year since Amazon Prime Video launched its default ad tier and Moss said currently it counts 200m monthly active users globally, including 115m in the US, 19m in the UK and 12m in Canada.
Amazon’s overall ad services grew 19% to $14.33bn in Q3, while subscription revenue grew 11% to $11.28bn.
Reflecting on the ad tier’s early success, Moss said he was “pleased to say it’s gone really well”, adding that it “hit our expectations” — although “we’re always unsatisfied at Amazon and we always want to do better on behalf of our advertisers”.
That includes new ones, be they new-to-TV brands or new-to-Amazon advertisers. Moss said live sports has been a major draw for these brands and Amazon wants to “democratise” TV by appealing to the long tail.
For example, he revealed 40% of advertisers during Prime Video’s Black Friday NFL game last month were new to Amazon.
American football has been a major boon to Prime Video. Apart from the Black Friday game, Amazon hosts weekly exclusive coverage of Thursday Night Football, which Moss said has helped to bring a younger audience to the game.
‘Considerable upside’: Amazon ad revenue tops growth among tech giants despite slowdown
The retail giant has also taken a “nimble” approach to client relations around these games to allow for eleventh-hour ad buys. Moss cited instances where Amazon “shot the ad the day of the game” for a client.
Moss championed Prime Video as helping to “bring full-funnel marketing to life” for advertisers by offering top-of-funnel opportunities alongside premium TV shows and lower-funnel opportunities driven by Amazon’s retail dominance and the data that comes with it.
That said, while Amazon can offer performance-based options, marketing chiefs at major brands have started to move back “up the funnel” after a Covid era in which performance advertising became increasingly popular, he noted.
“We’re finding advertisers starting to speak that [brand] language as well,” Moss said. “You can only get so far as a business mopping up excess demand. At some point, brands need to start to create demand.”
Moss said it “mattered that we had immediate scale” given Prime Video’s decision to opt all users into an ad tier or pay more to avoid ads.
Furthermore, a key point of difference in Amazon’s favour was how few ads run on the streaming platform, he suggested.
“We want to make sure we have a meaningfully lower ad load than other services,” Moss said. “We’ve been very consistent in wanting to have a great customer experience.
“We think if you show relevant ads that are informative and helpful about products and services that you’re interested in, customers will stick with you.”
Monetising Prime Video also drives revenue growth that can be reinvested into content development.
Moss said Amazon will continue to invest in “diverse content that appeals to a really wide audience”, including in sports, films and TV programmes, such as game shows and reality shows.
The post We’re a friend to the TV market, insists Amazon ad sales VP first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post 2024 in publishing: Headwinds galore, from Forbesgate to blocklists to AI first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The publishing industry faced a number of headwinds in 2024.
Several historically significant newspapers changed hands, digital traffic was harmed by changes made to search and keyword blocklists undermined the commercialisation of journalistic efforts — to name just a few.
As GroupM noted in its latest This Year Next Year report, print accounted for more than half of total ad revenue in 2000. Twenty-five years later, that figure is expected to be just 4.3%.
Still, there is hope for publishers. The new Labour-led UK government has repeatedly stated a commitment to supporting a free and open press, with prime minister Sir Keir Starmer calling journalism “the lifeblood of democracy” in October.
Here are five key trends and major stories from the past year in the world of publishing.
A number of iconic UK newspapers were sold.
Most recently, furore over a proposed sale of The Observer to Tortoise Media — first announced in September — led to strike action in early December by Guardian Media Group (GMG) journalists.
GMG has now agreed in principle to the deal. Under the agreement, the Scott Trust will invest in Tortoise and retain seats on its boards, while Tortoise is committing to invest £25m into The Observer.
Scott Trust and Guardian Media Group approve Observer sale to Tortoise
Earlier in the year, the long-winded sale process of Telegraph Media Group properties The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator saw progress. The latter was purchased by GB News and UnHerd owner Sir Paul Marshall for £100m in September. The following month, New York Sun owner Dovid Efune emerged as the likely buyer of the Telegraph, although he has yet to close the deal amid fundraising concerns.
This month, it was also reported that one the UK’s largest regional publishers, National World, is edging towards a £61.5m takeover by Media Concierge.
Although the Evening Standard did not change ownership, it did change its name. The daily regional paper announced in May that it would be moving to a weekly edition, laying off 150 staff members in the process.
In September, the title relaunched as the London Standard, but its early days have been tempestuous. Editor-in-chief Dylan Jones announced in November that he would be departing after just 18 months at the helm.
In the US, both The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong controversially intervened to deny the papers the opportunity to endorse vice-president Kamala Harris for president.
And the fallout was swift: the Post, already embattled by controversy stemming from CEO Will Lewis’ time at News Corp, shed more than 10% of its subscribers.
The debacle led The Media Leader columnist Raymond Snoddy to declare in October that “integrity in the media no longer matters and personal interests rise above all else”.
The great newspapers of the world just lost a couple of members
Perhaps the biggest adjustment publishers have had to make this year is responding to the ongoing development of generative AI and how it is likely to impact the future of the web.
AI developers are jockeying for control of what tech executives appear to believe will be the next generation of search: asking AI questions, rather than a search bar.
Google launched its AI Overviews feature, which provides generated responses to certain queries. The result, according to some who spoke to The Media Leader, is substantially reduced traffic potential from search. That is on top of already-reduced traffic potential from social media websites like Facebook and X following changes made to those platforms.
Publishers say Google’s AI Overviews have reduced traffic potential
In response, audience development teams are looking for new ways to improve outreach, such as via WhatsApp and Reddit. But the lesson remains: if you rely on a third-party platform for traffic, your audience could be randomly reduced overnight by opaque algorithmic adjustments.
Still, there is opportunity aplenty to be had from AI, at least according to publishing leaders like Independent CEO Christian Broughton. In an interview with The Media Leader, Broughton argued that media leaders “are more aware of dangers than they are of opportunities” here.
Numerous publishers, including The Independent, have inked partnerships with AI developers to license their intellectual property for use in training AI models and surfacing information when users make search queries with chatbots. This has opened up a new revenue stream for publishers, though terms of many deals have been kept secret.
Publishers are also actively putting AI tech to the test on editorial outputs, such as by aiding in article research and ideation.
While generative AI continued to make waves this year, AI more generally has been used for years in the media industry, often to the detriment of publishers.
At the start of the year, World Media Group CEO Jamie Credland warned in an interview with The Media Leader that “the biggest challenge [facing publishers] is advertisers or marketers who are shying away from election or war coverage, who are perhaps using keyword blocklists in an indiscriminate way and may not even be aware of it”.
Indeed, keyword-blocklisting was identified as severely limiting the commercialisation of articles that were not only brand-safe, but also high-traffic opportunities for advertisers. According to brand-safety and contextual ad solutions provider Mantis, nearly half of Reach’s Euros coverage and two-fifths of publisher Halloween content were wrongly blocked from advertising due to irresponsible blocklisting practices.
How keyword-blocking still harms publishers — with Mantis’ Terry Hornsby
September research from challenger holding group Stagwell further undermined keyword-blocklisting as a brand-safety tactic. It found that advertising adjacent to content produced by quality news brands is safe, regardless of topic. Specifically, even stories about war, crime or politics are highly suitable for advertising.
A similar conclusion was reached by Teads and Lumen in October.
Publishers also had their own scandal to deal with.
In April, Forbes‘ seven-year domain-spoofing ad scheme was uncovered.
Since 2017, the title had been placing many ads on www3.forbes.com (a website hidden from Google search and only accessible through clicks from other sites via Outbrain and Taboola) rather than www.forbes.com, where its readers generally are found.
Advertisers duped into buying on the relatively worthless inventory included major brands and all six major ad agency holding companies.
The revelation brought to the fore both the issue of made-for-advertising sites and how they were harming the broader publishing industry by funnelling adspend from quality websites. It also raised questions around how advertisers and agencies allowed it to happen for years without checking whether those ads had been seen by anyone
As columnist Nick Manning wrote: “Nothing is interrupting the lucrative money-chain that siphons advertising budgets with little or no responsibility for exposure let alone effectiveness.”
As news consumption has moved online, one perception of consumer behaviour that has become dominant is that young people don’t read the news (but rather consume it primarily via social media).
But that isn’t necessarily true.
In November, a new study from Newsworks, the marketing body for national news publishers, found that youth engagement with news brands is significantly under-reported.
However, the perception gap is so strong that few young adults are accurately recalling their news consumption when asked in surveys.
Heather Dansie, Newsworks’ insight director and co-author of the study, explained that the research also uncovered a “very equal” interest in hard and soft news content. The research hopes to provide a boon to an industry misperceived as old-fashioned.
As Dansie concluded: “Young people are engaged with the news.”
Young people don’t read news? Research from Newsworks suggests otherwise
The post 2024 in publishing: Headwinds galore, from Forbesgate to blocklists to AI first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub overestimating BVOD reach by 40% first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The issue was revealed by Omnicom Media Group UK chief planning officer Vicky Fox on a panel at The Future of TV Advertising Global on Wednesday.
According to Fox, in November Barb communicated to agencies the significant reporting discrepancy between the Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight, of which Barb took governance in January.
“Barb turned around and said: ‘Our measurement was wrong on BVOD,'” she told the audience. “Congratulations, the report that came out a few weeks ago — it could be 40% out on BVOD.”
Sky Media’s director of systems and development, Jeff Eales, who was chairing the panel, was shocked, saying: “So you told me something I genuinely don’t know.”
Fox added: “That undermines the trust in the measurement system.” Eales agreed: “It certainly does.”
The Advanced Campaign Hub is Barb’s pre-campaign planning tool. Launched in 2020, it combines linear Barb panel data with first-party data, with census-level impressions supplied directly by participating VOD services.
CFlight, meanwhile, offers a unified, deduplicated post-campaign TV advertising metric for linear and VOD services.
It is understood that a discrepancy has not been observed in linear figures.
Luca Vannini, head of campaign audiences at Barb, told The Media Leader: “Since assuming governance responsibility for CFlight in January 2024, Barb has prioritised the comparison of campaign forecasts produced by its Advanced Campaign Hub planning tool with the performance of actual campaigns reported by CFlight.
“The results of this assessment show that VOD reach estimates in the Advanced Campaign Hub tended to be higher than in CFlight.”
He added that, in collaboration with Barb’s industry stakeholders (including both advertising buyers and sellers), the TV measurement body is currently working to adapt Advanced Campaign Hub methodology to “ensure that the results are more aligned with CFlight”.
The Media Leader has learned that such changes could be made as early as January.
It is understood that the discrepancy goes back years and it was only after Barb took over CFlight that it was uncovered.
Adapting the Advanced Campaign Hub methodology “will result in lower VOD reach for campaigns at the planning stage”, Vannini explained.
He added: “This change shows how learnings from post-campaign evaluation can inform campaign planning to deliver a virtuous cycle of campaign optimisation across linear TV and VOD services.”
During the panel, Fox added that she is “usually frustrated” that she cannot measure BVOD like linear TV more generally and she wishes VOD ad server data could be better merged with data from linear to give a holistic view of broadcaster viewership.
Fox conceded that this is a challenge for the TV measurement body, adding that CFlight is “a start”.
‘Embrace simplicity’: Why TV needs to borrow from Big Tech’s playbook
The post Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub overestimating BVOD reach by 40% first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post The Fishbowl: Benjamin Loofe, PubMatic first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>Loofe joined PubMatic in May and has over 10 years’ experience across agency, publisher and adtech roles.
He spent more than three years at MiQ, where he was senior agency director. Before that, he was an account director at Teads.
Loofe has also worked at The Guardian as programmatic account manager and at PHD as regional account manager on Google.
You’re never sitting still! It’s a dynamic, fast-paced industry that constantly challenges and inspires me through innovative trends and opportunities for professional growth.
After over a decade in the industry, I enjoy being on the sell side, connecting buyers with premium supply. There’s nothing more rewarding than taking a campaign brief from concept to activation, watching it come to life and observing how it creates meaningful connections between brands and their audiences.
I’m noticing a strong interest in content signal capabilities across connected TV and online video. Our clients are also focused on enhanced targeting and reporting tools to boost campaign effectiveness.
The driving force is efficiency: clients want their campaigns to work smarter, not harder. They are looking to target their desired audience across premium inventory while maximising both impact and scale.
This is a tough one. It’s difficult to call out one, but the 2007 Cadbury “Gorilla” ad stands among my favourites. It was simple and bold and, as a consumer, you were thoroughly entertained while watching it, which was helped by a cracking Phil Collins soundtrack.
The second one is the 2002 Nike “Secret Tournament” ad. As a football-obsessed kid, I remember being amazed to see all the top global footballers playing together, including the great Eric Cantona making an appearance. Similar to the example above, the icing on the cake was the brilliant use of Elvis Presley’s A Little Less Conversation.
Learning a language. I think it’s such a great skill to be able to transition seamlessly between multiple languages. Although I never really enjoyed learning French at school, I would be interested in learning Spanish or Italian.
My boss will probably laugh at this, as I do it frequently, but I would say never be afraid to ask questions.
This applies internally when seeking product updates and collaborating with our EMEA team. Externally, requesting agency updates and understanding your customers’ needs are key to achieving your commercial goals.
It depends on who you ask! But, overall, I think they would probably say: friendly, approachable and golf–obsessed.
For me, it’s increasing our industry’s commitment to sustainability. While we’ve made meaningful progress, I believe agencies, advertisers and media owners can take more decisive action towards environmental sustainability.
Our partnership with GroupM and SeenThis demonstrated this potential by achieving two key objectives: reducing carbon emissions from digital creative delivery while improving viewability and carbon metrics.
The campaign successfully minimised carbon emissions by 2.09 tonnes — equivalent to 16,000km driven in a car! Through collaboration, we can create a more sustainable future for our industry.
Working remotely as the first Manchester-based hire reporting to London, I’ve built strong team connections through proactive collaboration. I actively participate in virtual team meetings and seize cross-team opportunities.
My monthly visits to our London office help strengthen these relationships — proving distance doesn’t have to mean distant connections.
Question from Mark Bucknell, chief commercial officer, JCDecaux UK
I like to start each day by taking a quick look at my calendar to familiarise my day and manage my time effectively. I split my daily tasks into two buckets: external tasks such as client meetings, briefs and outreach, and internal tasks such as sales admin and project updates.
This helps me stay organised and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Question from Pippa Scaife, vice-president, brand partnerships, NBCUniversal
Without a doubt, it would have to be successfully launching PubMatic’s UK north regional business.
After working in Manchester for the last six years, I knew this role was the next step for both my career growth and development. I feel incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity to contribute towards building a better supply chain for the future and I’m excited for what 2025 brings.
Question from Kelly Williams, managing director, commercial, ITV
Read more Fishbowl interviews here and see what media’s top salespeople say about working in the industry and what concerns their clients. To suggest an interviewee, contact maria.iu@uk.adwanted.com.
The post The Fishbowl: Benjamin Loofe, PubMatic first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post British media must show it can rise to the occasion on issues closer to home first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>Every now and again, the British media sets aside a deep fascination with itself — with endless splashes on the behaviour of a cookery show presenter or the tireless search for ways to undermine the government — and does a damn good job of journalism.
Almost without exception, the media rose to the unexpected news about how quickly the most brutal of dictatorships can collapse almost overnight.
From the Financial Times, The Times and The Guardian to Metro, the Daily Mail and Daily Express, they all gave proper weight and attention to the fall of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his exile to Russia.
According to The Times, as Assad was packing his bags, Syrian state television was playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on a loop while the president was said to be attending to “constitutional tasks” — which, in a way, he was.
The BBC did well by smartly getting its Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab, a Syrian citizen, into the capital Damascus, where her description of seeing piles of discarded Syrian uniforms told you all you needed to know about the fate of the regime. In the end, no-one was willing to risk their lives fighting for Assad any more.
By the BBC’s lunchtime news on Monday, its Verify team was out checking the accuracy of video images from inside the prison where thousands have been held and tortured — a prison that horrifyingly came with its own nearby crematorium.
The Daily Mail even produced a “special edition” that provided comprehensive coverage of everyone involved, what is likely to happen next and the rebel commander behind it all — the Syrian leader-in-waiting, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who at the moment has a $10m bounty on his head.
Its leading, sensible columnist — the one who is not Boris Johnson — provided the strategic insight that 7 October 2023, “when Hamas terrorists surged across the Gaza-Israel border to carry out a barbarous killing spree of innocent civilians”, has been the precursor to a fundamental redrawing of the balance of power in the Middle East.
The biggest loser, apart from perhaps Russia, will be the ayatollahs of Iran.
As Andrew Neil concluded: “I do not claim the ayatollahs are yet tottering. But they never have been more vulnerable. The smell of regime change is in the air.”
Neil might yet be surprised by how prescient he has been.
There are always outliers and not every national newspaper thought the collapse of the Assad regime was the most important story of the day.
For some reason, the Daily Star thought the fact that it might be windy on Christmas Day was of greater significance. The Daily Mirror splashed on a story about how a teenager with terminal cancer was helped to fulfil some of her dreams by Princess Kate.
The Sun just about passed muster with a small box — “Evil Assad’s fled to Vlad” — on a front page otherwise dominated by the “horror” car crash and broken leg of West Ham striker Michail Antonio.
Inside, though, there was perfectly good coverage of the “downfall of the devil” and what it might mean for international relations.
Overall, it’s a tribute to the way mainstream media can still mobilise journalistic resources from a standing start to both tell and explain the significance of a foreign story that could presage further falling dominos of dictatorship.
It would be even better if the media was also able to focus its attention, and resources, on some of the other ills facing society, such as the impact of climate change, the continuing folly of Brexit and, in the case of the UK, an increasingly polarised society that threatens to undermine democracy from the inside.
A good place to start would be a careful look at a report out this week by Dame Sara Khan, the government’s former counter-extremism tsar. Any weakening of social cohesion and failing faith in institutions provides “a permissive environment” for extremism to grow.
Khan found that, based on surveys, out of 28 democratic countries only the US was more politically divided than the UK and trust in the media was lowest here.
One stat is particularly worrying: 45% said they almost never trust the government to put the nation’s interests first. That’s up from 23% only four years ago.
Is that an issue of the actual behaviour of politicians or how that behaviour is reported?
The question is perhaps barely helpful. Measures of trust in the media, or lack of it, need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Trust compared with what? The unmediated outpourings of TikTok?
Perceptions may also not portray any sense of reality and, anyway, the media is not a single entity, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists.
However, a central finding of Khan’s review is that what she terms “freedom-restricting harassment” has become widespread and “is corroding both social cohesion and our democratic rights and freedoms”.
It ranges from “intimidating and censoring journalists, those working in the arts and culture sector, to academics and teachers, as well as non-governmental organisations and those engaged in civil society”.
Victims range across politics, class, belief and cultural spectrums, and 60% of respondents believe it to be worse than five years ago.
While it is great to see coverage of the fall of a foreign dictatorship, it is a relatively uncontentious topic to cover, even if not always safe for the individual journalists involved.
Let’s have more difficult coverage of the ills afflicting UK society and if mainstream media is even inadvertently responsible for the rise of freedom-restricting harassment, it should desist.
In the end, it is indeed a matter of trust.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.
The post British media must show it can rise to the occasion on issues closer to home first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post ‘Embrace simplicity’: Why TV needs to borrow from Big Tech’s playbook first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The TV ecosystem needs to “embrace simplicity”.
That was the core message delivered by James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising, at The Future of TV Advertising Global 2024.
Speaking in front of a sold-out crowd, Rooke pleaded for the TV industry to learn from the “Big Tech playbook” and adopt practices to simplify the TV buying process and make it more flexible.
He explained that, in conversations with advertisers, they have conceded that TV is held to an unfairly high standard relative to tech platforms. Third-party ad validation is seen as a “nice-to-have” for platforms, rather than a requirement, as it is for more traditional channels like TV.
The reason for the lower standard, Rooke surmised, is that tech platforms are simply easier and quicker to buy on.
Rooke offered one quote from an unnamed global media lead at a major healthcare company that highlighted the issue TV faces: “[Buying on platforms is] an easier process than TV. The lack of transparency is frustrating and I’m pushing for more buy details, but it takes less time, resources and internal rationale to buy [walled gardens].”
Rooke summarised: “The process of TV is too difficult. The Big Tech platforms make it easy. And easy matters.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom, Rooke assured delegates. “There is a genuine opportunity for premium video as a category to go on offence”.
He said there is “latent demand” from millions of small and medium-sized enterprises around the world “that have built their businesses on social and YouTube, but are frustrated and looking for a viable alternative to get to the next stage of growth”.
Rooke said that case studies of new-to-TV advertisers have shown a “hockey stick effect” — spiking search results for their brand in the 10-14 days after their first TV campaign launched.
Are AI ads the future of TV? With ITV’s Jason Spencer and Alan Hall
“That is significant and meaningful,” argued Rooke. He explained that, in the US, new-to-TV direct-to-consumer advertisers currently spend $4bn on TV advertising and this is just “scratching the surface” on the “latent demand market”.
He continued: “They want desperately to buy in and leverage the category of premium video, because they know it will help them to build credibility for their brand. But it is too difficult for them to do so.”
Similarly, agencies looking to spend on quick-turnaround ad campaigns for bigger brands are currently funnelled towards platforms that make it easy for them to do so, even if they know it may not be the most effective option.
Rooke argued that the TV ecosystem must take lessons from Big Tech’s drive to make it easy for brands to part with their marketing budget.
“There is a playbook and Big Tech has done an incredible job at simplifying the ability of merchants to be able to buy their inventory,” he explained. “And television has not done this and needs to do this.”
Rooke outlined eight “ingredients” to the playbook. They are:
1. Offer scaled, qualified audiences
2. Offer a standard, frictionless client user experience
3. Meet advertisers where they are through an API-integrated experience
4. Don’t have a “platform tax”
5. Use generative AI to help develop on-demand creative
6. Use performance algorithms that optimise against outcomes
7. Deliver always-on performance reporting
8. Offer seamless payments for clients through credit cards and automated lines of credit
“There has to be no learning curve,” Rooke added. “Because these small businesses haven’t got time to learn things and these small businesses have been conditioned over the past few years on what simple looks like.”
Rooke warned that it is not enough to shift to a more simplified model as individual TV companies, but that an industry-wide effort is needed to offer a unified go-to-market approach that provides scale to compete with tech platforms.
That would require moving from a “publisher-centric approach” to an “advertiser-centric approach” by creating a consistent, single access point for small and medium-sized businesses to buy premium video, be it with a specific company or a specific audience.
“All of us, including Comcast, lack the necessary scale when you’re up against other categories,” he admitted. “You have to bring scale and it has to be standardised and unified.”
He added that creating simplified, always-on, full-funnel performance measurement will be key to increasing TV’s competitiveness in the ad market.
Currently, although efforts are made to accurately measure TV’s impact (including performance impact), “it’s too difficult to measure impact in a timely way”, according to Rooke — and the TV ecosystem needs to be able to not just prove its worth but do it at pace.
“It’s about speed, speed, speed — not just about proving that it works,” he said. “If it’s too slow, it doesn’t matter.”
Furthermore, to future-proof the TV business as watching live events and sport via streaming becomes more common and ads are increasingly served programmatically, Rooke warned that the media supply chain must become more efficient to avoid a “bigger and bigger downstream issue” where user experience is impacted.
He concluded that it is well within the TV industry’s capacity to create such changes and start better competing for ad budgets in what has become a tech-dominated industry.
“Advertisers want this. We have the technology to do it. We have great products. We just need to execute it now.”
Global ad industry to grow 9.5% this year as revenue flows to tech giants
The post ‘Embrace simplicity’: Why TV needs to borrow from Big Tech’s playbook first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post Peter Field: It’s a ‘gross fallacy’ that startups don’t need brand-building ads first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>Startups need to create interesting, brand-building campaigns because dull ads will cost them £27m more to build awareness and £35m a year more to build trust.
These are just two notable figures highlighted by effectiveness expert Peter Field during his talk at The Future of Advertising Global on Tuesday.
As part of the ongoing The Cost of Dull project, Field wanted to show “what it costs when we don’t do” interesting work — “it’s the only way you’ll get a CFO to listen”, he joked to the audience.
Field used IPA DataBank figures on the top rational (what he labelled “dull”) and top “fame” (“interesting”) campaigns for his analysis.
Interesting work is defined as having sex appeal, is humorous and has dominant music tracks — all features that have a powerful impact on effectiveness. Meanwhile, the “classic” tools for dull campaigns are testimonials and a reliance on “authentic slice of life”.
Field’s analysis found that there’s a seven percentage point difference in share of voice between dull campaigns and interesting campaigns.
A clear trend was that interesting campaigns have been allocating more budget to brand-building in the past four years, from 65% to 71% of total budget. Meanwhile, dull campaigns have done the opposite (from 47% to 44%).
Importantly, TV plays a crucial role here — Field found that “interesting campaigns have been rock steady in their commitment to TV”, while the share of TV budget in dull campaigns has been in decline over the past decade.
Amplified Intelligence founder Karen Nelson-Field, who is also contributing to the project, suggested that you cannot build brand awareness with two seconds of attention; you need 2.5 seconds or more. TV, meanwhile, commands 10-15 seconds of attention on average.
As Field said: “It’s a huge missed opportunity, particularly for the TV industry — you’re throwing away one of the greatest assets TV has as a media platform.”
Peter Field: ‘Any sensible marketer would be crazy to walk away from TV’
Field, who has previously criticised an overreliance on performance marketing as ineffective, said that dull campaigns were found to focus more on performance channels.
In particular, he suggested there is a tendency for startups to only invest in performance marketing because they don’t think they need brand-building — “one of the many gross fallacies”, Field argued, since this is only true for the first year.
According to his analysis, while in the first year a startup needs a brand-building versus performance investment ratio of 35:65, to become a market leader it needs the ratio to be 72:28. As he said: “TV often saves the necks of these companies.”
Here, again, being dull costs. Field pointed to two key metrics that startups need for success: building awareness and building trust. His calculations found that it would cost £27m a year more for a dull campaign to build awareness and £35m a year more to build trust.
So how to create interesting, brand-building work?
On stage with Field, Eatbigfish partner and author Adam Morgan (pictured, below) shared some ideas for brands.
Citing research from Murray S Davis in 1971 on social theories, Morgan said the solution is to “deny a key assumption of the audience”. Orange France’s Cannes Lion Grand Prix-winning “WoMen’s Football” campaign, which tricks the audience into thinking they’re watching the French men’s football team, is a case in point.
“We need to understand what the assumptions are and how we deny them,” Morgan explained.
He shared another lesson from a conversation with Norman Stiles, former head writer on Sesame Street. According to Stiles, successful “little dramas” require two ingredients: showing what your characters want and showing what gets in the way of that.
Using Back Market and Who Gives a Crap as examples, Morgan said that “successful brands understand both of those” and urged delegates to “think about this strategically”.
“The bar is not what other B2B ads are doing; the bar is entertainment,” he concluded.
The post Peter Field: It’s a ‘gross fallacy’ that startups don’t need brand-building ads first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post Festive favourites first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>Last Christmas saw long running medical drama, Call The Midwife, take the honours, with 7.5 million people tuning in to BBC One’s 60’s set, East End melodrama.
Next, watched by 7.3 million viewers, was the first proper adventure starring Ncuti Gatwa as the fifteen iteration of Gallifrey’s most famous time traveling renegade in Doctor Who, which also introduced audiences to new companion, Ruby Sunday.
Third place was taken by the one-off festive edition of long running dancing show, Strictly Come Dancing, which pulled in an average audience of 6.5 million.
Explore more live and consolidated viewing figures in the Top Programmes Report in the AV app.
| Programme | Channel | Consolidated figures (000s) |
|---|---|---|
| Call The Midwife | BBC1 | 7,459 |
| Doctor Who (2023-) | BBC1 | 7,256 |
| Strictly Come Dancing | BBC1 | 6,537 |
| Ghosts | BBC1 | 6,453 |
| The King | BBC1 | 6,360 |
| Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel | BBC1 | 5,059 |
| Eastenders | BBC1 | 5,054 |
| The 1% Club | ITV1 (Total) | 4,757 |
| Film: Tabby McTat (2023) | BBC1 | 4,711 |
| Coronation Street | ITV1 (Total) | 4,393 |
The post Festive favourites first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The post The Wicked lie about female rivalry first appeared on The Media Leader.
]]>The collective cringe surrounding Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s Wicked press frenzy underlines an inability to see women as anything other than rivals.
Women are hardwired to hate each other and must be “rivals”. So entrenched is this narrative that mainstream media brands simply don’t know how to respond to true sisterhood when they see it.
Wicked is a marketing masterstroke on every level. Yet it is the humanity and intensity of the relationship between Erivo’s Elphaba and Grande’s Glinda that has captured fans’ hearts and minds.
Mutual respect and an unwavering promise to look after each other are the foundations of the two women’s relationship. Yet post-premiere front pages of The Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail all featured a head-to-toe image of Grande on her own. Anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of Wicked knows that Elphaba is the main character. Misogynoir remains rampant in the UK press.
Then came the predictable false narratives and leading questions that uphold the myth that existing as a woman in the public eye automatically puts you in competition with your female peers. Do Erivo and Grande like each other? Why do they hold hands? The truth, bubbling under the surface, is that we find such a supportive and mutually respectful relationship between two women weird.
When faced with two women at the top of their game who truly love and support each other, rather than celebrate the relationship many media brands have instead sought to shame it and sabotage it. That shifts the lens from what should be the true source of our shame: that such an example of solidarity is so rare.
Breaking this toxic cycle of rivalry isn’t easy.
Women can and do internalise patriarchal messages that women are not as strong, competent or capable as men. Women in our industry who have faced the sharp edges of sexual harassment and maternity discrimination have learned the brutal truth that women aren’t always on your side. Or, worse still, women are complicit in the cover-up.
Just look at the Greg Wallace debacle. Our collective sympathy is rarely focused on the female victims. Media platforms routinely shame women for speaking up, when we should celebrate their bravery.
At a time when the orange face of Donald Trump, the world’s most famous misogynist, is about to take another turn around the presidential sun, the need to challenge this toxic narrative has never been more urgent. Women’s bodies are under attack. Yet not only do we collectively look the other way, we wage a never-ending war of judgement against each other.
Ask yourself how often you have heard these criticisms: too direct, too emotional, too demanding, too difficult. Then ask yourself how often you have heard them from another woman — a woman simply reloading a misogynistic washing machine of biased feedback. This rinse-repeat cycle of misogyny risks one generation of women paying forward the misogyny they experienced to another.
It’s time to call a truce. We are not destined to be rivals. Reject misogynistic media narratives and biased feedback. Consider your own role in perpetuating and paying that bias forward. Because let me be absolutely clear: if you talk negatively about other women more than you talk to them, you are part of the problem.
It’s OK to be jealous of other women. Jealousy is a natural human emotion. But it is not OK to punish other women for it.
We need to take the shame away from professional jealousy. Learn to listen to your envy; it is simply telling you where you want to go. Celebrate the women blazing the trail. Use your privilege and platforms to amplify women doing the work. Learn to credit, not copy, the women who inspire you. Normalise everyday amplification of women’s voices.
Think carefully about what you need to unlearn. Be intentional about challenging a culture that routinely holds women to impossible standards. All of the best editors I have worked with have been routinely described to me, often by other women, as “difficult”. The world and the media industry desperately need the talent and tenaciousness of difficult women. So speak up for them when they are not in the room. Advocate.
Let’s commit to building a culture in which women don’t have to endlessly prove themselves. Stop stereotyping young women as “snowflakes” because they don’t think harassment is “banter”. Recognise that the expectations of young women today will raise the standards for everyone, if we only take the time to listen, learn and raise them up.
So many young women in the media industry are locked in a state of perma-burnout, stumbling to the end of the year feeling spent. It is tougher than it’s ever been to get a foothold in the industry. In London, tenants spend over half of their wages on rent.
Research from the Young Women’s Trust suggests that nearly a third (32%) of young women reported their hopes for the future had got worse over the past year. Over a quarter (26%) have stayed in a job they didn’t enjoy because they couldn’t afford to leave.
In such a hostile environment, we cannot afford to keep pitting women against each other. To always make other women the villains in our story.
Let’s be intentional in shedding the insecurity and jealousy that leaves us disconnected from each other. There is a huge under-utilised collective power in taking pride in other women winning. We need to learn to compete with each other, not against each other.
You don’t need to be able to defy gravity to defy the expectation that other women are the default competition. At the end of a long day, when I unpack and repack my daughter’s school bag, it is always filled with little notes of love and support from her crew: BFFs forever. I think you are amazing. You scored all the goals. You are brilliant. Notes that remind me we simply aren’t destined to be rivals.
When we back each other, we can win together. I am always on your side.
Nicola Kemp has spent over two decades writing about diversity, equality and inclusion in the media. She is now editorial director of Creativebrief. She writes for The Media Leader each month.
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The post The Wicked lie about female rivalry first appeared on The Media Leader.
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