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The Digital Revolution Has Been Televised: In 2019 OTT Shows Content Incumbents They Can Fight Back

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It took them long enough. Finally, incumbent content players have stopped passively biting their nails about the digital tech giants and figured out they can toss around their weight (and massive amounts of data) and challenge the present leaders by leveraging their loyal audiences, pricing their services creatively and not fumbling around with hairbrained confusion over distribution “platforms”—just using the powerful digital delivery opportunity that is there for every company to go direct to consumers.

Now that OTT is here with a bang—with Disney+, and even Apple TV+, disrupting the disruptors—TV and digital have hit their full convergence moment.

Disney+ is, as everyone knows by now, the much-ballyhooed streaming service that the fabled content producer will launch come November. With an unrivaled library of existing offerings, including the recently acquired catalog of 21st Century Fox, and the know-how to create more entertainment legends, the traditional content producer's new OTT service is its Herculean pushback against the existing leading video players: (almost) digitally native Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime—and Disney executives didn’t lose their way in the weeds fretting about how to deliver. The company just stepped up and skirted the existing leaders, and even went around the cable operators, to forge a new kind of release, and re-release, strategy.

For $7 a month.

Disney is not alone, of course, and it’s in good company. More so-called traditional TV networks and cable companies are getting into the mix. AT&T/WarnerMedia, Viacom and Discovery are all working on OTT options.

All This Upends Seller-Buyer Traditions—and Calls Into Question the Future of the Upfronts

While all the seemingly endless announcements of new OTT services are good news for consumers, and for the content owners, the titanic shift in competition asks marketers, again, to rethink their media-buying strategies. These new services fragment the audience further, and it’s up to the smart marketers and buyers to figure out how they will use this all to their advantage.

Just as the 2019 television upfronts get underway, one has to wonder if one of the last bastions of traditional media for catering to marketers is nearing its obsolescence moment. How long will the famously elaborate presentations, celebrity hobnobbing and delicacy-eating be around? The marketplace forces that created the upfronts’ raison d’être—high demand for a tightly limited inventory, purchases of content as proxies for audiences and monopolistically/uniformly defined schedules for when the new series and seasons premiere and end—have faded into history.

In the digital world, none of that time-based sales offering exists. Poof! Primetime is gone now that all television and video is on-demand, all the time, on any screen with consumers choosing to pay for the channels they want and not all the stuff they don’t. And just like in internet advertising, TV advertisers will have better targeting, frequency capping, performance-based results and more—all the advantages that have propelled the adoption of programmatic technology across other media today.

Tara Walpert Levy, VP Agency and Media Solutions at Google, captured the phenomenon with her thoughts about forgetting prime time and following consumers’ passions. Levy points out, “Today, it’s viewers, not networks, who are the gatekeepers of what’s considered popular programming. … Viewers are redefining primetime and marketers need to keep up. People want instant access to content that is helpful and related to their passions.”

Of course, there will always be popular “event video” that brings mass audiences together for premium buys, and the predictable tentpoles that are worth planning ahead by marketers will be live events. Upfronts could morph into hype parties six months in advance to sell the Super Bowl, the Oscars or the GRAMMYs, but will they need giant dog and pony shows to buy the entire lineup?

Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of Simulmedia, has long been a pioneer in understanding that television could not resist the digital imperative: “The fact that everybody in America gets the same ads at the same time for the same products has never made that much sense...Today, when there’s thousands of products for a lot of different people, sold a lot of different ways, television needs to be made a lot more efficient to work for all the advertisers.”

It’s no surprise, then, that AT&T’s advertising unit Xandr will be hosting a presentation, on May 14, in the same week when Disney, CBS and NBC Universal will be doing their upfronts. Xandr CEO Brian Lesser promises that its presentation will be “full of people talking about how data can be applied to TV and how they can extend their budgets into digital formats.”

It happened. The Year of Buying Television Differently is upon us, and brands will have to equip themselves with the desire, and the capability, to buy audiences, measure them and build their businesses in new ways. In the fray, the media landscape, which everyone has been saying is set in stone with certain winners and certain losers, has reshaped again. Stay tuned.