GroupM's Adam Gerber at TVB Forward Executive Summit: Helping Marketers and Local Broadcast Through Confusing Times

President and CEO Steve Lanzano, interviewing Gerber, wasted no time in getting to the heart of the challenges (and opportunities) that face the local broadcast community. From currency to measurement to holistic integration, decades of technological and consumer media consumption and behavioral changes seem to be coalescing into a massive disruption for the underpinnings of the business models.

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When asked by Lanzano what he was hearing from recent discussions with marketers, Gerber answered simply "confusion." Gerber indicated that there is a lot of noise in the marketplace, especially from data and currency start-ups.

"What start-ups love is to talk about all the great stuff that they are going to have and make it sound like they have it today," said Gerber, who in addition to agency and large media sales roles has also worked at start-ups. "What's real and not real is the challenge." Gerber believes that the role of the agency is, in great part, to help clients focus on what they can do at scale and identify the key opportunities to grow their business in the short term.

One of the areas generating the greatest amount of confusion is the current state of currency. Gerber pointed out some of the glaring weaknesses in some of the alternative models today, including a major issue for counting CTV impressions when an external device, such as a Roku Stick, Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV stick is being utilized. "We've done a lot of work on continuous play," Gerber explained. "There is an issue when a consumer turns off the TV, but not the device. There is nothing telling the device to shut down or the app (e.g. Hulu) to stop calling for impressions. The app could, theoretically, call for content and ads in perpetuity. It's the Wild West."

Lanzano pressed Gerber on what his ideal currency would be. Given the media sales community's rush to come up with an audience-based currency, Gerber (being clear that this was his personal preference and not representative of a GroupM position) surprised many when he said, "Sell me Persons 2+ impressions. Let me as the agency/marketer decide how to extract value, define audiences from those impressions. Ultimately you will get to a point where you, the seller, are extracting as much value out of the inventory that you have to sell, and the buyer is extracting the maximum value out of the impression which you purchased."

Measurement is also a key area of confusion for marketers. "Measurement is a huge issue for the clients as they move from historical models in intrusive ad models and metrics of exposure and reach to metrics around outcomes and accountability," Gerber continued. "We need to navigate that sea change. All the tools that we use haven't changed much. Using planning and activation tools which are focused on exposure to manage buys will not work in a new world that is built on an impression-based/dynamic insertion model."

He does see promise in ACR (automated content recognition) data that is utilized across most major TV manufacturers to measure all activity at the "glass" level. However, that data currently has two issues. First, it currently only measures household data (although there are several efforts currently in play to get closer to individual data), but the bigger barrier lies in the fact that each television manufacturer locks their ACR data into a walled garden.

Gerber issued a call to action to Samsung, Sony, LG, Vizio and others to pool their data. "They need to understand that their data in its current form isn't a competitive asset," he asserted. "It's the reverse problem of the cable set-top box. The cable set-top box can measure the entire HH's viewing, but only for linear. The TV manufacturer can measure all viewing on the glass, but only for that set -- and consumers have multiple sets in their homes, often from different manufacturers. The data needs to be normalized and nationalized."

As relates to the local broadcast market in general, Gerber is hopeful. "I think local broadcast has a tremendous opportunity," he said. "While the changes happening on national TV definitely have a downstream impact on the local markets, marketers are still very much interested in things that happen on a local level.

"How you bring that to life in the programming is critically important; as is how you change your advertising solutions," he concluded.

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