Stanley Lumax

🚨Trend/Rant/Insight Alert🚨   Across almost every sector and industry, content production is moving in-house. I’ve seen a marked shift towards building out small to mid-level production capabilities inside major brands and agencies in the last six to eight months. From full-time, production and post-production ready teams to Creator-minded TikTok and Reels specialists armed with nothing but an iPhone and a ring light, companies are finding the investment and overhead worth it to ramp up their content mills.   I think there’s a few implications here. For one, the demand to increase speed and decrease the time between inception and publishing is real. Companies and marketing teams, especially for huge global brands, can see social trends come and fade before their processes and workflows can even be engaged, let alone capitalize on them. Smaller, faster teams, closer to the decision-makers give them a puncher’s chance at striking Trending gold. “Learn TikTok,” seems to be the “learn to code” for 2024 and if your marketing team isn’t hiring an in-house creator to be a TikTok machine, they’re one of the few.   And secondly, and likely what I think is truly driving this, brands and agencies want to hold on to as much revenue and fee as possible. Instead of outsourcing specialist contractors, vendors or freelancers on a project-by-project basis, they want established, known-quantity teams with consistent workflows, fixed cost structures and to minimize OOPs. When advertising and marketing budgets get tight, it’s easy to look at production (which is basically *all* OOPs) and see an easy area to trim.   I think there’s pros and cons to this approach. In-house teams can be fast, agile and will know your brand inside and out. They can also get stylistically stale and, at some point, cap out on capabilities and technical know-how. The upside of engaging a wide freelancer and vendor network is the ability to bring in new talent, exciting technologies and fresh perspectives regularly. Additionally, the vendor marketplace (hopefully) means there’s true competition on price and while revenue may be going out, it is (ideally) actually more efficient on a per project basis.   I think the most successful brands will balance a well-rounded internal team for regular, drumbeat content with an extensive network of freelancers and vendors for must-win moments and big swings. Going forward, it’s important brands that build in in-house production continue to train, grow and invest in those resources and not see it as a one-time hit to this fiscal year’s numbers. And production vendors need to understand what role agencies and brands want content to play and continue to bring innovative, efficient offerings to the table. It's never been easier to make great content and tell great stories. But who you choose to make those stories will determine just how successful those stories get told.

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Great insights from Jack Murphy on Waystar's S-1 filing! As the IPO market heats up with Waystar following #Rurik, #Reddit, and #AsteraLabs, it's essential for comms teams to understand the strategic elements in these filings. Check out how Waystar uses various levers like customer testimonials, AI integration, and its diverse client base to help build investor confidence. A must-read for anyone navigating the path to public markets. If you have an IPO on the horizon, check out our IPO Playbook: https://lnkd.in/gc-VvN5h ....or get in touch with the Brands2Life team. #IPO #CommsStrategy #Waystar #AI #CustomerSuccess #InvestorRelations

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More and more brands are wondering how they can advertise effectively to consumers across a fragmented identity ecosystem. Kristina Prokop's recent article in AdExchanger drills down the 4 ways brands can continue to maintain addressability for their omnichannel advertising strategies. 💫 Integrate audience data and first-party data: Brands can unlock more information about their customers and enable more precise targeting and personalized experiences by enriching their first-party data with audience data. These enriched data sets can then be used to find new like-minded audiences that represent a brand’s most receptive prospects. 💫 Use context: Contextual data and targeting – fueled by data and insights into the content people are consuming and how they’re consuming it – enables brands to tap into predictive audiences without relying on cookies. 💫 Adopt universal ID solutions: Brands can engage their users without cookies across channels by shifting to strategies that embrace universal IDs. While no single ID will replace the cookie, an ID-agnostic approach that combines the power of multiple IDs can go a long way while complying with all applicable privacy rules. 💫 Target omnichannel environments: Brands should also deepen their investments in channels that have never depended on cookies, including audio, CTV, DOOH and others. These channels represent growing opportunities to reach relevant, engaged audiences. Dun & Bradstreet Eyeota, a Dun & Bradstreet company https://lnkd.in/ex87Grxe

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The latest COMvergence ranking underscores GroupM's continued dominance, with $62.6B in total global billings in 2023. Three of GroupM's agencies ranked among the top 5 global agency networks. EssenceMediacom led the way with $24.5B in global client billings for 2023, followed by Mindshare and Wavemaker. T&Pm was recorded as having the highest growth rate of any large group agency, with 13.4% growth. Learn more about GroupM's COMvergence rankings & market shares: https://lnkd.in/eyyip4b5

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New Insights on Gen Alpha to help brands prepare.

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✅🖥️ Variety (7/1): “ Pay TV. SVOD. AVOD. Social video. They aren’t often grouped together, but the latest data in the new Variety report “Social Video vs. SVOD: The Race to Replace TV” suggests they can be thought of as a series of historical shifts in U.S. audience viewing behavior. First, the cable business broke broadcast TV’s stranglehold in the 1980s. Thirty years later, Netflix led a field of successor streaming services that siphoned eyeballs at equally sizable scale from linear TV. And now even though streaming is hardly done in terms of its growth relative to broadcast and cable, there are signs of a paradigm shift already in motion: a third wave of fragmentation in which social video begins to eat into the market share of major streaming services. Data keeps mounting that video consumption on the big social platforms — primarily YouTube, TikTok and Instagram — is growing strongly, with users spending more time on these platforms each year. In this report, Variety provides a data-driven probe into how this viewing may impact time spent with subscription video.” ⬇️ #streamingtv #ctv #ott #upfronts #socialmedia #tv3 #cordcutting #genz https://lnkd.in/eUbfGa_D

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Jounce Media's newly published State of the Open Internet Report explains the industry’s chronic bidstream congestion issue and how to address it. This latest research highlights the trend toward consolidation we are seeing on the supply side and is a must-read.

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✅⬇️ AdExchanger (5/24): “To some degree, the digitization of TV marketing is inevitable. Wall Street investors prefer advertising and media companies with the most promising long-term profitability. One way to get there is for streaming companies to access shopper data and strike partnerships with retailers to court advertisers with the promise of performance and attribution. Publishers want to relabel connected TV as a performance channel, (an analyst) said. But if that happens, she continued, “CTV will lose its cred” among buyers and brands as a viable replacement for legacy linear commercials. Say what you will about linear, but it’s a mass reach vehicle. And if CTV doesn’t provide the same reach opportunity, Wall Street may cool on public companies with a CTV advertising business, (the analyst) said. The reality is, upper-funnel channels, like streaming, have a strong downstream impact on outcomes even if they don’t directly drive a purchase. For example, CTV’s ability to drive mass reach and brand awareness is why more retail media spend is moving to streaming, said Max Willens, a senior analyst at eMarketer, also speaking at Programmatic I/O this week. According to eMarketer, the proportion of retail media spend going to CTV should grow from 12% this year to 20% by the end of 2027.” ⬇️ #shoppabletv #streamingtv #programamtic #ctv https://lnkd.in/eu7AbtTU

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Jounce Media's newly published State of the Open Internet Report explains the industry’s chronic bidstream congestion issue and how to address it. This latest research highlights the trend toward consolidation we are seeing on the supply side and is a must-read.

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OK, so it happened. What's next? ▪ Sale Deadline: ByteDance has up to a year to sell TikTok to a U.S.-approved buyer to avoid a complete ban. ▪ Potential Buyers: Speculation surrounds potential buyers, including groups led by former financial officials and large corporations. ▪ Legal Challenges Expected: The legislation is likely to face legal pushback from various stakeholders, including the Chinese government. ▪ Continued Availability: TikTok remains accessible in the U.S. for now, but future access is uncertain pending legal and governmental outcomes. ▪ First Amendment Concerns: There are significant First Amendment challenges, as the platform is widely used for political and educational content.

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What does the current TV media buying landscape look like? I think Nielson's Alison Gensheimer nails it on the head - "TV isn’t going anywhere, it’s going everywhere." Today's TV media buying landscape is becoming more like programmatic media buying, and I think that's a good thing. For advertisers, its always has been about finding the right audience, and now more than ever programmatic TV is leading the way and paving a path for how the future of linear TV buying will be done. #MediaBuying #TV #MediaBuyers #programmaticmediabuying

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Sixty years ago Marshall McLuhan made the bold suggestion that the Medium is the Message. I wonder what he'd say about today's media-fragmented society? To simplify McLuhan's theory: He argued the way we communicate a message (the channel) has a direct impact on how that message is received. In The Wall Street Journal this morning Suzanne Vranica writes about how brands are moving away from television advertising and redirecting those dollars to mediums that are more relevant to targeted audiences like TikTok. It's clear that Prime Time television in the U.S. is no longer "must see TV" but when advertisers leave it then decline is inevitable. The same thing happened to another medium - newspapers. In a mass media world, should the medium be dictated by what entertains the masses most? I worry that if we continue to go down that road the result will be little more than dumb show and noise. It all makes me think about this Edward Albee quote from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf": "Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested” In this instance, prime time TV was once good, then cable came along and was better, eventually we had streaming and social media and some thought that was best. In the end maybe all it has amounted too is the message (and maybe truth) getting bested. If you want to be part of the conversation on attaining Relevance with key stakeholders subscribe to The Relevance Report. Subscribe on LinkedIn https://lnkd.in/dqccYc9z #BeRelevant #PublicRelations

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Perhaps you noticed media costs increasing on some key digital platforms leading up the Presidential Debate.... well you are not alone! Check out our summary and POV on what to expect and what you can do as election season continues to heat up. #media #mediaplanning #agency #analytics https://lnkd.in/g83jUYmA

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✅🖥️ AdExchanger (6/3): “Seedtag was mainly attracted to Beachfront’s SSP direct integrations with TV and streaming publishers, which is something that Seedtag doesn’t have much of. These publishers will attract new demand and more scale for Seedtag’s contextual ad products. Seedtag entered the US market in 2022. But it wasn’t until earlier this year that it launched its first CTV-focused contextual ad product that allows advertisers to apply contextual targeting signals to their streaming buys. More advertisers are now looking for addressable alternatives in light of signal loss and privacy concerns, which, in turn, is driving more interest in streaming ad products. Hence Seedtag’s decision to buy rather than build in order to capture that growing demand. Beachfront operates both a video-focused supply-side platform and ad server.” ⬇️ #streamingtv #ssp #dsp #ctvadvertising #spo https://lnkd.in/evvUE4hY

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✅🖥️ Fortune (6/20): “For a $10 monthly subscription fee, Jetflicks users could watch shows on multiple devices and platforms within days of new episodes appearing on legitimate services and channels, authorities said. The indictment states that the site obtained content from pirate sites such as SickRage, (also known as SickChill), Sick Beard, SABnzbd, and TheTVDB and offered it up in one place to subscribers. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have more than 37,000 paid users and 183,200 episodes of television. Authorities estimated the monetary harm to program owners to be in the millions. (Defendants) also launched iStreamItAll, which allowed users to stream and download TV and movies, the indictment states. iStreamItAll (ISIA) subscription plans had a monthly fee of $19.99, plus quarterly, semi-annual, and yearly options. Similar to Jetflicks, ISIA did not have permission to provide content, officials said.” ⬇️ #streamingtv #fraud #piracy #ctv #ott #svod https://lnkd.in/eXXBfYeY

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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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The IAB Predicts Social Video Will Overtake CTV This Year. Social video “is taking more of a lead over CTV” because it provides better campaign reporting based on an advertiser’s preferred business outcomes, a capability that CTV lacks in comparison. Marketers are under pressure to justify their investments by connecting their ads to results, which is why they’re raising investments in social video more than CTV this year. But in my experience while attribution remains the king, we need to think about incrementality. https://lnkd.in/dYze9K-3

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