How to move a sofa – the issue with chasing views

Opinion: Strategy Leaders

All elements of the media landscape provide different encounters and they offer something different, writes Wavemaker UK’s head of video.

There is no denying (and this may not be ground-breaking), that over the last few years there has been a decline in linear TV viewing.

Combine this with high inflation as we come out of the pandemic — especially amongst young audiences and it leaves the industry in a position whereby your linear TV budget will not afford you the same levels of reach as it once would.

However, on average, in 2022 linear TV still reached 85% of the UK population every week and TV inflation is still tracking behind the UK CPI.

This has led to a scramble in our industry to re-capture those eyeballs across the ever-expanding video landscape to achieve historical reach levels. We have become consumed by our pursuit of the elusive, rarer than unicorn poo, light TV viewers.

Not all impacts are created equal

Within the scramble, however, there have been glimpses of clarity. It is widely acknowledged, and as clearly demonstrated in Wavemaker’s Open Video approach, not all impacts are created equal and there is a hierarchy of video platforms, which, for the most part, TV has always sat proudly atop. It is also fair to say that not all impacts are measured equally as we recently discovered from conversations between Barb and YouTube.

So how do we solve this problem? We want the eyeballs back, but we also acknowledge that not all impacts are created equally.

To overcome this, we have found ourselves in a situation whereby we overlay indexes or weighting based on a seemingly endless list of factors to equivalise those views to something comparable. These include, but are not limited to, screen size, cost per completed view, shared viewing, brand safety and not forgetting the current metric flavour of the month, attention, which every supplier seems to have a view on, and every supplier seems to be the best at dependant on their individual (and often wildly varied) interpretation of what attention is and how we should be measuring it.

Whilst these weightings create the illusion of equivalised impacts, this approach has its limitations. These different platforms are not designed to be equal, they are not all designed to be viewed in full, to have your undivided attention or to be viewed on a big screen. They are different and they will achieve different things, so rather than try to equivalise them, just let them be different.

No amount of weighting or indexing will change what the ‘thing’ is. A small screen, online video or two second view will never be the same as a 60-second spot in a multi-million-pound TV show, enjoyed in full, on a big screen, with your family. And that’s okay! A TV view is unique. A YouTube view is unique. A cinema view is unique. They are all different encounters with different viewer mindsets, different need states, differing costs and a differing ability to deliver against different outcomes.

Imagine hiring a truck, then, that morning you rock up to the hire company ready for a day of trucking only to be told that they no longer have a truck. But what they do have is three motorbikes and based on the number of wheels, three motorbikes are the same as one truck.

Fine, if the reason you were hiring the truck was because of the number of wheels it has. Not so helpful if you want to move a sofa.

Of course, that is not to say that three Motorbikes have no use! If you wanted to move three people from A to B quickly then it is infinitely more effective than a truck, and that’s the point. They are both brilliant at certain things, and by ignoring that individual brilliance in favour of a comparable element you are doing a disservice to both, but, in this scenario, it doesn’t matter how many motorbikes you throw at the problem, they will never be as effective at sofa moving as a truck.

Replicating the effect and not the reach

What is the solution then? How do we re-coupe those lost eyeballs? how do replicate bygone reach? Well, the short answer is, you don’t.

The longer, much more helpful answer is to re-coupe and replicate the effect, not the reach. Perhaps a car with a roof rack could do the same job as a truck?

Looking at those ‘lost’ TV impacts, the apparently obvious path of least resistance is BVOD: broadcaster quality content, watched on a TV set, shared viewing, sold by the very same suppliers — perfect right? But that can only be the answer for some of those lost impacts.

The key is understanding encounters and what about that encounter is driving that particular outcome. Is it the quality of the content? The state of mind of the consumer? The contextual relevance of the placement? This is where thoughtful planning comes in; not all TV encounters are the same, not all of those ‘lost’ impacts are viewed in top shows, viewed in the evening with high duel viewing and engagement (traditional direct-response impacts — Monday to Friday daytime viewing — have dropped by more than 20% on pre covid times). You can’t replicate that with broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD).

BVOD can’t replicate the encounter of someone passively channel hopping, landing on something they are half interested in, half scrolling their phone, half chatting – maybe that encounter is more akin to doom scrolling through a social video platform.

This of course goes beyond video. New platforms entering the market and replicating encounters causes disruption and provides opportunity across the board. Every commuter scrolling a social media platform isn’t taking in OOH messaging, every podcast listened to on a long car trip is occupying the soundwaves previously taken up by radio, everyone tackling the daily Wordle while munching their morning Coco Pops isn’t doing the Sudoku in the paper — yet it is fair to say that all of these replacement encounters are fulfilling a similar purpose and can be used to achieve similar marketing objectives.

Who knows, in the future, platform wear-out may drive us back to the familiar and the comfortable. And if/when that time comes, we will need to once more evaluate the role each platform plays.

For now, we need to acknowledge that all the elements of the media landscape provide different encounters and they offer something different, not better, not worse, just different and by forcing them to be equal we are only doing them a disservice.

Think about encounters and how it serves to meet your objectives, make decisions based on the effectiveness of different channels to replicate those encounters and ultimately achieve those objectives.

When you need to move a sofa, use a truck.

Sam Olive is Head of Video at Wavemaker UK.