Everybody Wants Convergence. Nobody Agrees On The Definition

Last week at the Beeler.Tech Navigator conference in New York City, I spoke with Huda Kazi, VP Advertising Technology & Operations at Warner Bros. Discovery, about the myths and realities of building a truly “converged” video advertising product across vastly different media environments. We were lucky enough to be joined in the workshop session with publishers from the digital side as well as adtech operations for a dominant CTV hardware and software platform. The dialogue felt like the next logical step in a continuum of discourse dating back decades about just what a digitally connected consumer experience should be, and how great marketers can master the skills and techniques to leverage the technical advances of their publisher partners.

At some juncture, it’s important to define the term itself, just what we all mean when we say “convergence’. According to Gemini AI, it means “the act, state, or process of two or more distinct things coming together, meeting, or becoming similar”. This is a fine definition, but I like the Merriam-Webster online dictionary definition better, which reads: “the merging of distinct technologies, industries, or devices into a unified whole”. The phrase “unified whole” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this definition and is just subjective enough to mean different things all depending on one’s agenda. For a seller, it can mean a single order for uniform campaign delivery across platforms, while for a buyer it can often mean the de-duplication of audiences across formats, platforms and devices for greater efficacy. In the end what matters most for any “converged” campaign is that both buyer and seller agree on the precise understanding of the commitments made, and how they will be maintained and measured.

As the conversation shifted toward today’s converged media landscape, one thing became clear: traditional, or “linear,” TV still sits at the center of how media investment is planned and delivered. Even with the focus today on digital audience segmentation and efficiency what became clear is that despite its declining popularity, scheduled television programming remains a highly effective way to reach, and activate, consumers. And this really shouldn’t be controversial. Commanding a viewer’s full attention still matters. Sight, sound, and motion create emotional associations with brands in ways few formats can replicate.

Comparing that to 1.5 seconds of an ad with the sound on as an billable “impression” almost seems silly to see written out like this. The objection that “we don’t even know if the person is watching” is the reddest of Herrings, (and I happen to love Herring) only because we’ve never known if a person is watching any screen, anywhere. All we have are inference signals, the strongest of which can be measured in brand loyalty over decades, not transactions per ad units delivered. The “performance” marketing camp will always try to out-quantify their rivals for media dollars, but for some odd reason seasoned and sophisticated marketers tend to never abandon brand building via mass media even when they are also pursuing performance.

So a converged media plan, and media buy, by definition means having multiple media formats or mediums, included. And there will be some unfortunate incongruities in terms of managing frequency (both household and individual) across these media types but let’s not pretend we had a real handle on the actual delivered frequency of any video medium, either linear, AVOD, or FAST. We didn’t and we know it. What we do know is that the rights owners are in a slightly or even more than slightly better position than aggregation or delivery platforms to meet delivery guarantees to advertisers. This advantage comes from owning inventory across all points of distribution and having the rights, know-how, and incentive to leverage this into a carefully managed, human-stewarded campaign across linear and digital channels. No knock against the platforms, they have data and insertion stacks that are the envy of most video programmers, but until they can interoperate using a single instruction set and act identically to each other from an advertiser point of view, they will continue to be well fortified castles within autonomous city-states, while the programming networks can claim a national identity. 

Weak metaphors aside, it’s interesting to note that even in the age of AI and the idea of autonomous agents making media decisions like a high-frequency futures trading platform, we’re still not agreed on just what makes consumers consider and choose products or services based on media exposure. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe we don’t ever want to have some kind of consensus on what really constitutes “performance” because it means we’ll all keep needing to experiment and to try new and innovative things. That’s why I always believed that media is very much a creative endeavor, as much as making that next great TV ad or billboard. So no offence to the media quants reading this, but I’ll be in the back with the creatives working out the next breakthrough idea.

Andrew Rosenman is President of Arise Media Group, the advanced TV consultancy he founded in 2005 after working as a digital agency executive within major advertising holding companies. Over the past two decades, Arise has become a leading Connected TV planning and buying agency for public service campaigns supporting governments, cultural organizations, and private enterprises, with a focus on “Media With A Public Purpose.”