Operating In Bifurcated Media World: Q&A With Operative’s Lorne Brown

Weisler: What is the biggest problem in media today?

Brown: Succinctly: mixing and matching of currencies and execution systems.

Weisler: Frankly, doesn’t it all come down to impressions for both linear and digital?

Brown: There won’t be a single metric ever, ever again. It’s gone. Even when you use Nielsen, there will need to be a secondary metric that goes with it, especially if someone is talking about business outcomes.

Nielsen doesn’t track that. They can help with attribution and figuring out where media came from that generated an outcome, but the outcomes themselves are always going to be different based on the buyers themselves.

Weisler: For a common metric, impressions make the most sense.

Brown: Logic-based people would agree. But not everybody agrees, for different reasons. Agencies don’t have the capital structures necessary to dismantle their systems that are based on Nielsen audience measurement. So they are going to ride that out as long as they can.

Networks don’t want it to change for another reason, because if everything went from a rating point to an impression, all of the waste gets exposed. And right now, people are comfortable buying that waste because buying TV generates enough reach relevance where they don’t mind the waste.  But if it starts to get dissected, all of a sudden the pieces that have high effective CPMs because they have been sitting in that rating bucket will obviously be worth less.

The cable operators and the station groups, on the other hand, are cheering impressions on because they have everything to gain by impressions. They have sold in a granular way for a long time, and it can be used to do more targeting. So it’s not just about logic. It’s about top and bottom line protection.

Weisler: How long do you think it will take before things change?

Brown: I do have an end date in mind. I think when everything goes IP or enough of a percent that goes IP, there will be an organic shift where people will become choice-less and they will have to go to this more granular currency. In between all of that, it’s now up to the TV companies to figure out how to live in a bifurcated, digitized world.

Weisler: What are the challenges to conquer and what do you hope to accomplish by this time next year?

Brown: Our role is to help media companies lay track for their future and have that be the same track that they all transact on. We are doing it now. AT&T, Charter and Comcast all use Operative and then there is NCC which sits in the middle. They all use a product called Connect to trade inventory with each other, streamlining the buying process and bypassing paper. Connect is also being used to create a bridge between Operative and MediaOcean.

So if I want to be a media company at scale, I have to solve a lot of marketplace problems.  I have to get more inventory. I have to figure out what to do mixing and matching currencies, unifying products, and I have to make this look seamless to any type of buyer.

To that end, we have developed a “Counsel” of the top ten networks in the U.S. and recently had our first meeting in Charleston. We specifically spell it Counsel, not Council because it is a collaborative initiative to stitch this confederation of businesses together, made up of the industry’s top operational and strategic experts.

We started the conversation around what is going to be needed to help create scale into the future into a world of converge media buying. And we will continue to spearhead this initiative so companies can get the credit for all of the audiences they deliver without forcing complexity on the shoulders of the buyer. Technology, scale and simplicity for TV as a platform is our goal.