The year in media review: YouTube, Mondelez, Unilever, Google and Comscore
As 2015 comes to a close, The Drum gives you a short but sweet overview of the biggest media trends from the last 12 months.
It’s been another testing year for advertisers and publishers as both wrestled with the knock on effects of tremendous cost pressures and procurement departments; from the unprecedented wave of media pitches to the rise of ad blocking, the last 12 months have been a rare confluence of events that’s emblematic of companies slowly but surely seeing marketing as a way to make money and not just a cost.
A quick look back at some the quarterly summaries from the likes of Coca-Cola, Unilever and Procter and Gamble highlights that shifting mentality, with companies now more likely to draw attention to their media strategies to show the market they can unlock growth. Many of those strategies are underlined by technology, data and content, according to WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell, who also got to positioning his programmatic platform Xaxis to absorb advertisers’ first-party data in 2015.
But when the amount of data gets truly big, so do the problems in managing it all. McDonald’s spoke for many of its peers when it admitted it needs a more holistic data strategy to fuel its media buys, whereas the move by News UK to make data more integral to its commercial process reflects the efforts of many other media owners.
It wasn’t just publishers that spent the year changing how they use data. With TV ratings now declining more than expected, advertisers want to lean harder on data to power investments outside the traditional TV bundle. That demand was highlighted in the confidence with which YouTube told advertisers they would need to shift a quarter (24 per cent) of their TV budgets over if they want to reach its younger viewers. There was also Comscore’s merger with Rentrak to “build the iPhone” of media measurement as proof of the untapped money-making opportunities to be made from more people watching TV online.
Consequently, video became even more integral to media strategies. Brands see the format as a way to get people to pay attention to their ads in environments where they have traditionally been ignored, while publishers such as News UK and Condé Nast redoubled efforts to harness that potency to premiumise their display inventories. It’s still early days for both factions, with 2015 being a year of preparation from the likes of Mondelez and Domino’s, as well as Facebook and Google when it comes to mobile video.
Both Facebook and Google see video as another way of keeping more people on their sites for longer. The implication of a Facebook or a Google gobbling up more content was not lost on publishers who were worried that they could eventually lose audiences to these new media platforms. The Guardian is one such publisher, and earlier this year it revealed a wariness of having to work so closely with global online platforms due to concerns over how much traffic and data it has to relinquish in these partnerships. To that end, Facebook, Google and Apple launched Instant Articles, Accelerated Mobile Pages and Apple News respectively this year to encourage publishers to push more content through their own ecosystems.
It got worse for publishers; media agencies ramped up their claims for more content budgets traditionally handled by publishers, who in turn established their own internal branded content shops. Brands like Mondelez and Paddy Power also thought they could get in on the act, spending a big chunk of the year investigating how they can shift their businesses to think like publishers and make money from content.
And then there was ad blocking. Seemingly able to strike fear into many publishers and tepid enthusiasm from advertisers at the same time, this year’s biggest media trend had everyone from Vice to Unilever talking up its impact on how future media strategies will be shaped. No player was able to execute a definitive solution for a trend some forecasters predict will cost $22bn in 2015, though there were some early tests. City AM banned ad blockers from its site, while an executive from the Mail Online let slip that its focus on pushing online readers into its apps was also taking them out of the ad blocker “danger zone”.