Broadcasters and Streaming: We Get it. Or Do We?

Many broadcasters have gotten religion about ways of streaming their product.  They understand that there are two additional groups of users out there – those who want to watch or listen to programming as it’s broadcast but can’t access a receiver, and those who would prefer to watch or listen to that same content at a later time.

They have that understanding.  Cool.  But it’s how they address it that’s really missing the mark.

Courtesy,
Jay Ward Productions

Sherman, set the WABAC Machine for 1930.  Let’s go visit the Galvin Brothers¹ as they place a radio in a car.  I selected that point because the auto radio presented a special problem…selecting a station while driving.  Tuning up and down the band – such that it was under the Federal Radio Commission – was done with peril.  Dodging ruts and rocks while spinning a dial to find a station wasn’t easy.

So we made it easier.  By then Major Armstrong² had invented the superheterodyne process so listeners didn’t have to tune multiple stages.  That, alone, made radio ready for home.  But for the car:  presets.  Push a button and get to a preset frequency.  One could listen while on the road.  So what’s the big deal?  We made it easier for someone to listen to our product.

Sherman!  Get in the machine.  We’re going back to 2016.  We have AM and FM in cars.  We have Wi-Fi, WiMAX, even Bluetooth to get from our phones to the dash.  And we have buttons…myriad buttons.  We have them at home, too.  I’m convinced that many of them don’t even do anything…they’re just there.

Well with all of that, you’d think the idea would be the same as a paragraph ago…make it easier to listen/watch. Yet broadcasters are missing the boat.  A combination of poor use of technology and overzealous marketing is killing streaming.

Weblands Archive

Do you spend a lot of time listening to broadcast streams online?  I mean, do you spend a lot of time listening – after you join their club, give them a significant amount of information, including your location, then reload the page because after you clicked “Submit” the page hung or you were sent back to the site’s home page.  Or maybe you hit “Back” and got the old “For [browser} to reload this page, it needs to resend information.  Do you want to do that?”  You click “Yes” and you get the page but your info is gone.

More often, you’re faced with a wall trying to keep you out.  Like opening a restaurant and putting an oil drum in front of the door.  Seriously.  You’re asking visitors to come in; use your product.  Sure, if you’re a car dealer and you want them to take your latest SUV for a test drive, demand a driver’s license, thumbprint, picture and saliva sample (I cleaned that one up).  But we want people to come in, like what they see or hear and stick around.  Why the heck put a bar on the door.

On other sites, you get the impression that a wunderkind told management, “If we put the stream behind 5 clicks, think of all the extra impressions we get along the way.”  Really?  That’s good business?  It is if you check your analytics and see that almost all the folks heading for a stream actually make it through all the clicks.  If not, you might as well make your stream the last frame in a Taboola list of 25 celebrities who never learned how to tie their shoes.

Aha!  I got in.  Now we’re cruising.  Well, maybe.  If you limit your streams and people can’t get in, they probably won’t come back, especially if you’re offering syndicated programming.  You have to have a high enough number of concurrent slots available.  I’ve seen it.  You log out and can’t get back in.  I’ve been there – on the wrong end – as prospects called saying they couldn’t get the stream.  Not good PR.

OK.  You got in.  Suddenly there’s the dreaded preroll.  This has gone from :05 to :10 to “I don’t care how long it is, I sold the preroll to 10 advertisers so you run ‘em all.”  A few enlightened streamers offer visitors the ability to skip ads they’re not interested in.  Many broadcasters don’t.  Heck, they’re still scratching their heads of DVR zapping.

Let me reiterate:  you have to make it easy to get to your stream.  Do 2 :05s or a :10 and see how it works.  Look at the numbers.  How many stick around, how many leave.  You can A/B this with two links.  Alternate them so that half the visitors get, say, a :10 a :30 and another :10 preroll.  Then give the other half just a :10.  Then just look at the stats.  The revenue will probably fit along a bell curve – no preroll, no money, little bit of preroll, little bit of money, etc. all the way to lots of preroll, no money. 

Also, think about overlays.  Viewers will tolerate them if they don’t get in the way of important information.  I mean, on broadcast, we’ve already given up the lower third of the screen to promotion.  Sadly, people are used to it…used to a bright animated lower-third wiping its way across the screen during a dark stakeout.

Then, consider the real estate of the entire page.  But do so within the context of all the possible devices you’re serving.  If you’re distributing to multiple platforms, you can deal with each differently.  If you’re not, you may want to consider adding additional formats.

We’re done, right?  Oh, no, no, no, no. How about the stream itself.  Why do broadcasters, of all stream providers, seem to gravitate to lousy standards.  Part of it is cost.  Maybe we/they don’t want to continually upgrade.  Or they don’t want to pay for bandwidth.  Maybe it’s a training issue.  That shouldn’t be the case.

Remember the Adobe Flash wars with Apple and Android?  I will tell you that it made streamers miserable.  It also pushed us toward .mp3, .mp4, even .wmv and .wma.  During the evolution, a lot of prospective viewers and listeners came, saw, and, unfortunately, left.  We’re starting to get them back.  But now we have to keep them.  How?  Quality streams and minimal glitches that are playable on the maximum number of devices possible.  Nirvana.  Utopia.  Impossible.  But that has to be the goal.  We still have to make it work before we can sell it correctly.

Beyond live streaming, what about podcasts.  Well, I’m going to save some of that for the future.  But on a basic level, what are you offering and how do viewers/listeners get there?  Putting up those oil drums again?  Really!  If you promote them on the home page, link right to them.  Yes, have an aggregate page too, where you offer them all.  And you can insert commercials judiciously.

But how do I figure out who’s coming?  There’s an old survey adage – never ask a question in a survey that you can get the answer to elsewhere.  If someone is masking their IP address and you can’t see where they’re coming from, do you think they’re going to tell you on your club page?  You do?  Well, don’t.  There are many ways of finding out where someone is coming from.  Your visitors might not think so but there are. 

So, bottom line, let’s clean up our act.  Get a good compression scheme, pay for enough slots, and get your prospective visitor to the content as quickly as possible, consistent with making a buck, knowing that if in increase the advertising, you may only make half a buck.

¹ If you don’t recognize the name do a little digging.  Won’t take more than a click or two for your eyebrows to go up.  Hint:  Their products are still alive and well.  Uh, sorta well.

² That’s right.  Major Edwin Armstrong, inventor of FM has plenty more creations to his credit.

Make Way for Programmatic Advertising Buys

I’ll admit, it was some years ago when I would get a call at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday about a particular advertiser jumping into a weekend movie or sports event and how I thought it would “do.”  It was “fire sale” time and as a full-service agency with blue chip clients, they called us at three.  Then they called the bottom feeders at 3:45 (that’s quarter of 5 in New York) with whatever the full-service guys didn’t buy.

For me, saying yes just meant that I thought the show would do as well as was being stated and wouldn’t offend the prospective client.  The media buyers (if I call them buyer-planners, you’ll figure out the shop so I won’t do that) evaluated the offer, how it fit into the plan and what was available to run.  It was great for the client but took a lot of agency time mopping up on Monday or whenever the book came out and the call about underdelivery and makegood offers were received, adjusting the schedule and sometimes “finding the money.”  They did it because it was right for the clients despite the work.  There were lots of Friday nights spent with media buyers working with account and traffic folks to get commercial material out to the integration point.

That’s a bit tongue-in-cheek except for the workload.

What’s that they say, “Sometimes, when everything changes, nothing’s changed.”  And here we are.  Programmatic advertising has a substantial foothold in the digital world and it’s making its way into broadcast.

Programmatic…an interesting term; one that doesn’t reflect its concept.  If you’re in broadcast and haven’t been following the digital side (blame it on being overworked) the programmatic world means machines talking to machines to hit demo, reach and frequency targets…and doing so in real or near-real time.

Boss:  "What are you doing?"  Buyer:  "Buying."  

Machines?  No buyers phoning and asking for avails?  Nobody telling a radio sales guy, “Look, I’m buying 18-34 3 deep in the top 30.  That’s it.”   Yep, machines.

Stations are either incorporating software directly or aligning with a number of services to aggregate their inventory for sale.  In most cases, you assign X inventory to the system and it gets offered for sale.  Stations can determine the costs – well, you’d have to agree, it’s the marketplace that ultimately determines the costs – they get inserted then seller machines talk to buyer machines and it’s off to the races.  Buyers can buy in the future or real time.  Of course, wait too long and that inventory you wanted may be gone

The concept isn’t new to the digital world.  Online is available this way now.  It’s a natural extension to broadcast media.  As a consequence, traditional stations and shops are moving into the digital world, some willingly and others dragged at the hands of either unsold inventory or infrastructure costs.

Keep in mind that you get what you get.  Machines aren’t all that smart and the buy will be pretty parochial.  If you want isolation, forget it.  Protection, like keeping a Southwest Airlines out of the movie Alive, generally is not available.  And as far as post buys are concerned, that depends on the programmatic organization. 

Buyers can buy [cheap] with nothing as a post but the invoice.  On the other hand, both advertisers and stations can get nearly instant reports sliced more ways than with a Popiel Kitchen Magician.  And it all integrates with traffic, billing, operations and virtually any other area of the plant.

Think about what this gets the advertiser.  He/she can run a consistent campaign across all media, directed at exactly whatever the desired demos are, and probably buy it for a lot less than is being paid now. 

If you’re tracking my thoughts, you’ve fast-forwarded to “so who needs a national rep?” which would make you fear for the demise of the wonderful rep firms.  Well, they see the freight train coming and many have already adapted including a Katz/iHeartMedia alliance for aggregating and selling radio advertising via programmatic. 

But remember, during all of this, it can be machine talking to machine, freeing up people for more creative and entrepreneurial activity – better programming, more promotion, whatever.  Then again, it could reduce your staffing needs.  If you just sign up to sell that “excess” inventory staffing won’t change but as programmatic sales succeed – as defined by increased advertiser satisfaction – you’ll probably find yourself rolling more inventory into the programmatic world.  Especially when it makes it so easy for those advertisers to achieve their goals – and you don’t even have to care about what they are!

Your concerns become questioning what is selling versus what you’re offering then tailoring your programming to reach the very people that are being “purchased.”  That way, the computer sees you and buys you.

Is this fun or what?

Well, let me throw something out there:  How many sales guys have developed a relationship with your clients?  How many times have you been able to jump in and help move someone's product because you knew what the problems were or what challenges they were facing and you got past that?  How many times did a relationship get you a buy that was a toss-up with a competitor?  Yeah.  Wad that all up and throw it away.  And your reputation for delivering?  Tie that to a CPU somewhere in Virginia.

If you get the chance, check out simulmedia.com, tubemogul.com, wideorbit.com, katzmediagroup.com, and the programmatic organization, programmaticadvertising.org/.   

NB:  Did you know the Kitchen Magician made julienne fries?