Media buyers split on move away from daily overnights
Last week, Seven West Media MD and CEO, James Warburton made the case to ditch overnight TV ratings, however it seems for now, media buyers remain torn over the value of the current rating system.
Speaking on the ABC’s Saturday Extra this weekend, Warburton said we are seeing “dramatic changes in the way we’re viewing things”, that screen time is “booming”, and when looking at the total TV ecosystem, it is “aggregating up to some incredibly staggering numbers”.
Warburton has been vocal about a move away from daily reporting over the last week
Of course, the “Big Picture” is an absolute necessity. Aggregation of the channels that content is available on (as long as it is de-duplicated) is a key metric at a strategic level, be it for the advertiser’s annual plan or for the next campaign.
And of course ” the Immediate Picture” is also an absolute necessity (for electronic media). As Chris Colter nicely described … “in-flight optimisation”.
I simply cannot see why they can’t ALL be in the market. While agencies can see the overnights, the advertiser has to rely on ‘Top 20’ overnights or for the buyer to provide it to the advertiser. In the main, the advertiser is more concerned about the ‘weight’ of the campaign yesterday and not whether Seven or Nine were top of the pile.
Being a Swans fan, footy can provide many answers outside of the game.
To me, it would be like going out to dinner on Saturday night, missing the game broadcast, racing home to see how the Swans went, only to find out that I’d have to wait a week to see the result. Not happy Jan (well, James).
So what would be wrong with reporting all three of:
* Overnights
* 7-day
* 28-day
Such a model would provide an additional benefit that the audience accumulation rate over that period of time would be transparent, and would definitely assist campaign planning.
What James actually called for was a pause in overnights to reset the conversation. Once people get used to seeing the full picture, you could start reporting overnights again, but he sees the reset as necessary to force a greater total video measurement view.