S2
Episode 12
The Power of Programmatic for Political Ads
About This Episode
We look at how political advertising is evolving, and how programmatic technology is helping agencies run political campaigns that thrive.
Ryan Horn | President, Bullhorn Communications
Katrina Moore | Senior Account Executive, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
The beginning of every planning process should be imagining yourself as your target voter, you start out relatively unknown. And your goal is to get, you know, 80 or 90% of the people that are going to go vote to be aware of, you know, a little bit about, you know, your name and try to get 50% plus one to buy. Consultant partners and clients that we work with and agencies themselves need to always remember that creative is king.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:31)
Curious to know what industry-leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever-evolving digital landscape? The How Agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward-thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.
Matt (00:00:51)
Hey, everyone, welcome to this week’s episode. My name is Matt. I’m the host of the How Agencies Thrive podcast, and I’m also the Education and Development Manager at StackAdapt. Today, we’re joined by Ryan Horn, the president at Bullhorn Communications and StackAdapt very own Katrina Moore to do a deep dive into all things related to political advertising. Now, before we get started, I’d love to hear from both of you to bring our guests up to speed on your experience in the programmatic space. So starting with you, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Bullhorn Communications as an agency, how long you’ve been in the industry and what you consider to be your largest areas of expertise.
Ryan (00:01:36)
I’ve been in and out of the political advertising industry, or the political industry, per se, for about 20 years. I’ve been in the advertising industry for about 15 years. And so, my path to political advertising is different than I think most people in that space, and I learned the advertising business in the commercial world. And then came over to to political advertising. I started my career in politics, I was very excited about the conservative movement and politics generally. And then, at the age of my late 20s, I decided to make a career change and went into the commercial world, the corporate world and worked inside Walmart. And then at a regional agency, here in Omaha, my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. And then I just got a little bored with, you know, a potential lifetime of writing ads for Taco John’s and Nachos Navidad and mattress ads for Nebraska Furniture Mart, nothing wrong with that a lot of people listening to this, this podcast, I do a lot of commercial work like that. And I certainly respect it. I just felt like I needed, I wanted to take my advertising skill, and try to apply it towards making our country a better place, which is always something I’ve been interested in.
Matt (00:03:00)
Now, Katrina, over to you to tell us a little bit about sort of your role at StackAdapt, what you do and how long you’ve been in the industry and some of your areas of expertise.
Katrina (00:03:10)
Thanks so much, Matt. Yeah, so my name is Katrina, I am an account executive at StackAdapt. I’ve been here a little over a year, this will be my fourth political election cycle. So I started in 2016, during the presidentials, and just really fell in love with it, when I was based in DC. Currently, you know, I handle all sorts of programmatic sales, with political advertisers from you know, list building, to fundraising to persuasion, and oh, you know, work with candidates PACs, advocacy groups, nonprofits, that’s really my specialty.
Matt (00:03:42)
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Katrina. Now that everybody’s been properly introduced, I think what we could do is dive into the episode. For those who don’t know, this is actually the last episode of season two. And I can’t think of a better way to close things out than by covering political advertising, especially for our listeners in North America. 2022 is going to be a big year, with the midterms coming up, as well as some general elections happening in Canada during the summer and fall. So let’s dive in. Starting out, I’d really like to get our listeners up to speed on the whole notion of political advertising. So as a vertical that’s deemed more sensitive, and can be nuanced and requires strategic advertising solutions to reach its target audience. How would both of you define political advertising? And how does this compare to other verticals such as B2B and B2C? So what are some of those key differences within the political space?
Ryan (00:04:40)
I want to defer to Katrina, one of my great friends and partners in the industry. But, you know, I think the biggest difference, you know, and like I said, I started my career working in commercial advertising. For a long time. I think the biggest difference between commercial and political advertising is just the Scale of reach that is required and the speed with which you are challenged to achieve it. Right. You know, when I was working in commercial advertising, you know, most of our clients like if we could have gotten, if we could have gotten 11% of the residents of Omaha, Nebraska to buy a taco at Taco Johns once a week, we would be heroes for life, our account would never go into review ever, they would build statues at the corporate headquarters to us. Okay, in political advertising, 11% is nothing that’s embarrassing, right? Most of our clients in political advertising start out relatively unknown. If you’re running for State Senate or legislature or you or even US Congress, Mayor, you know, you start out relatively unknown. And your goal is to get, you know, by election day, more, you know, 80 or 90% of the people that are going to go vote to be aware of, you know, a little bit about, you know, your name, and try to get 50% plus one to buy. There really is nothing else like that in commercial advertising, where you have to achieve so much reach, and you have to close that sort of sale, you got to get 50% market share in a matter of a couple of months, starting from a brand that doesn’t exist, to put it in commercial terms. And it’s a very unique challenge, intellectually very challenging, and I kind of love it.
Katrina (00:06:25)
Yeah. To add on to that. Yeah, it’s mostly a speed thing, right. So commercial advertising, you don’t have necessarily as strict of a deadline, as you do with political, there’s an election date, or there’s a bill that’s trying to pass or, you know, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that you’re trying to get people aware of. And like Ryan said, you have to get the majority of people who might rally behind whatever your causes, you have to get them aware of these issues very quickly. And by that deadline, whatever that might be.
Ryan (00:06:56)
Absolutely. It’s, you know, it’s a little bit like, imagine if McDonald’s could only sell french fries, one day a year. Right, their ad campaign would be very different than their marketing campaigns that we see today. Right? And that’s a little bit what it’s like, I mean, in America, and most places, it’s not one day a year you have absentee voting, but it might be you know, it might be 15 days, or it might be 30 days at the most. So yeah, that timeline element is really what makes political advertising unique.
Matt (00:07:30)
Fantastic. Well, yeah, that definitely helps our listeners kind of wrap their head around the differences. And what I think we could do here is shift gears to talk a little bit more about the agency side. And Ryan, I’m interested to hear what you have to say here. And, you know, as we established in the intro, the elections that a lot of advertisers are focused on right now in North America. I know they’re a few quarters out, but that deadline is coming up. And there’s a lot to be done. In the meantime, you know, to start strategically thinking about how you can drive success and drive the highest amount of success to both of you. What do you think agencies can do to make sure that they’re prepared for the upcoming elections? And more specifically, Ryan, for you on the agency side? How are you best supporting your clients to kind of keep them informed as to what direction they should be going as this deadline comes up?
Ryan (00:08:24)
Yeah, you know, I think, to your point, things are really getting underway. You know, the Texas primaries will be the first in the nation this year. The first primary is March 1, and the runoffs follow in May, then you’ve got a whole slew of May primaries, Nebraska, and a whole bunch of other states. So they’re coming up very quickly, I think you’ve got, again, two things to think about as an agency, if you are an agency that is already into political advertising, and you have political clients. That’s one thing, if you’re a more of a commercial agency, and you’re thinking about trying to maybe get into some political work and do some of that business, you’re probably too late for this cycle. I know that might sound kind of shocking, depending on what type of agency you are, if you’re more of a niche agency or a specialized agency, there may be some services you can provide to other political agencies. But in terms of becoming a full having full-service clients, you’re on the verge of of becoming too late. So you need to you need to really jump into that marketplace with both feet if you want to try to get in there at this point in time. I think there are a couple of things that we focus on in this time of the cycle, which is one capacity, right? Because we know that it’s going to ramp very, very quickly. The amount of the workload is going to ramp very, very quickly. There are always clients that you know, that come in at the you know, I decided to run for this and I need to have an ad you know, I need to have an ad campaign up In seven days, like that always happens. And so making sure you have the capacity to handle and being able to project well what that workload is going to be so that you can make a good informed decision about about capacity. So, do I have enough full-time staff? Do I have enough freelancers? Do I have enough creative partners? You know, we’re we are known for having very sophisticated and effective creative. That’s our niche in the business. So making sure we have top-level graphic designers, animators, shooters, making sure we have our a team all in place to be able to handle that capacity is what we focus on. The other question you asked about, okay, what do we how do I what do we need to inform our clients about is really, that, to me, that comes to the media side. And that is that just the changing media environment, the changing nature, of how people consume entertainment, and media and where their eyeballs are, is changing very quickly. And so keeping our clients who are most of our clients are, you know, who are running for office are not, they’re not sophisticated advertisers, you know, that’s one of the other differences with the commercial world, in the commercial world, you’re working with a vice president of marketing is probably your day to day contact. This is a person who usually understands advertising at least a basic level and has some training in marketing, and you speak the same language. And they are watching these kinds of trends. With political candidates, not so much, right? And they can really vary a lot in terms of their knowledge and awareness of platforms, like CTV, and what does OTT even mean? And do people really watch this stuff? And, I mean, I can put an ad on my on somebody’s phone, right? I mean, these are, so helping our clients understand that fast-changing world of media is a big part of what we do.
Katrina (00:11:58)
Yeah, Ryan’s hitting the nail on the head here. But what I always advise agencies, and they know this, anyone who’s done political knows that this is how it works. But you have to use the off cycle to prepare for the on cycle. Number one. Number two is even when you have all your processes in place, you have your partners in place, you think you have a good projection of how the political year is gonna go, in my experience, it’s always going to be more than you think. Yeah, Ryan’s probably familiar with that. So you just need to have a process in place that can handle that sort of overflow, or you have the partners in place that can help you with it, because it’s going to be so much work in a very fast, fast-paced deadline. And then, you know, what agencies can do just like Ryan is saying, a lot of the candidates just aren’t as informed. They don’t know about these emerging platforms that you can use. And so you really have to make sure you’re putting the client’s best interest. And I think that’ll lead to the next question. But for example, like Ott, a lot of that’s where I’ve found a lot of the political advertising to be over the past few cycles, but there are, there’s always going to be a new, a new way to reach different audiences, especially, you know, you’re trying to reach that key demographic, whether that’s, you know, women voters, suburban moms, young people, and they’re not necessarily just on, they’re probably not even on cable TV at all. So you do have to find them where they’re at. And that usually does require educating your client.
Ryan (00:13:25)
Absolutely. You know, and I think a good media agency in the political world, I think, has to understand all of the changing dynamics, not just digital, right. So you have to understand what’s happening in the radio market, you have to understand what’s happening in the cable markets, you have to understand how satellite is bought and sold, how interconnects work, you have to really look hard at household penetration and changes in terms of you know, subscribership, and you have to be able to have access to that data, to understand that data, and to really break it down and make the best possible recommendation to your clients.
Matt (00:14:13)
Katrina, you actually, yeah, you perfectly transition to this next question, because I wanted to ask both of you about sort of these emerging channels, you know, something like OTT, CTV, programmatic audio, things that are kind of replacing or supplementing these traditional channels that we’ve seen used in this vertical. I’d like to know starting off, you know, what kind of impact does this have on those traditional channels that we’ve seen utilized, such as broadcast? And are these emerging channels proving to be you know, a more comprehensive solution as this audience becomes a little bit more broad and you need to really narrow in on your targeting to reach them in the right place at the right time?
Katrina (00:14:57)
Yeah, happy to Jump in. Thanks for that. Great question, Matt. Yes, so, you know, CTV the big thing that that’s a more recent trend. CTV wasn’t that big when I first started in political but now it’s exploded. And you’ll see a lot of news articles talking about cord cutters. That’s the main reason. And to be clear, you know, linear is not going away, you still definitely need linear in your plans to reach people, I would say CTV is more of a complement to that, you know, CTV you normally see, first of all, it’s measurable, which it’s a little bit harder to measure linear TV, but CTV we can tell you exactly how many impressions served what the video completion rate was. And usually, you’re gonna see that 99% plus completion rate on CTV, which is great, it means that people are seeing your ad, usually completely watching the ad versus, you know, a little bit harder to tell on on linear, but I would say, definitely a compliment. Definitely the number one thing that’s always the first thing on a plan from an agency, it’s CTV, followed by video and then display afterwards.
Ryan (00:15:56)
No, I agree. I, you know, I think there’s a couple things going on here too. And I talked about how to be a good advertising agency for a political client, you have to understand all of the advertising platforms and how they fit together. One of the ironies that that I see here is this shift away from traditional bundled packages of cable and satellite into more OTT, and more streaming TV, there’s a couple little ironies that I think people should understand. One is that it has made broadcast television more powerful, not less. And the reason for that is that a lot of people when they when they switch away from their cable subscriber, they still want to watch they still want to watch the Cornhusker game on, you know, and it’s running on the ABC affiliate, right. And so advertising on that, you get that you’re if you buy that broadcast spot, you’re going to get your ad in front of people’s eyeballs when they’re watching the Cornhusker game, almost no matter how it’s getting into their living room, right. So it’s allowed broadcast TV to maintain its household penetration, while cable and satellite household penetration has decreased due to lack of due to the diminishing subscribership. As people move away from the old bundle packages, and towards more and more streaming TV. That’s number one. And number two is, I think, the way to think about CTV connected, which we’ll loosely call CTV, we can call it a million different things, streaming TV, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is just people watching TV. And it’s on a big TV, and it’s in their living room, or their bedroom, or whatever. And last month, they it came in through a cable, and this month, it comes in over there a router, but it’s the ad the experience to the viewer is the same, right. And so we need to look at it that way. And consider it that way, when we’re looking at when we’re talking about CTV, CTV and OTT, which is to say we need to look at a kind of the way advertisers and ad is looked at broadcast TV versus cable TV, a certain percentage of people had cable TV, it was a growing segment, you had to start to buy there, but you had to understand the limits of its of its household penetration. Now we’re kind of in the same situation, I think. So TV is king, it always will be we’re going to come up with different names for it based on what wire it goes in on or what not wire, it doesn’t go but you know, with his wireless, whatever. But the combination of motion and video and sound is the most emotional way for humans to communicate with other humans. And that’s not going to change.
Matt (00:18:41)
That’s a really good point, Ryan, that, you know, there almost has to be that sort of emotional connection or some type of connection that somebody running for any type of office needs to make with their voters. And you know, fortunately, reaching them on some type of television is often a good solution for that. And before we head to our break, Katrina, I wanted to tap you on the shoulder one more time to address the idea of technology coming from your side where if we look at, you know, this notion of running attribution studies, you know, measuring any kind of lift in political campaigns, do you have any thoughts on sort of what weight that holds in the future in this vertical?
Katrina (00:19:24)
I definitely have a lot of thoughts on this. So, you know, usually political advertisers, especially for these big races, but almost all the time, you’re gonna have polling, either external polling, or you’re gonna hire someone to do polling. You know, you get texts, you get phone calls, you’re getting blasted with these ads, but you want to know how people what the sentiment is, are they feeling good about this candidate? What did they like about it? Do they like your policies? Are they going to vote for your candidate? Very important information to know and adjust because you’re on this quick timeline of the election. So what I would say is we offer something called Brand Lift studies, which is a great way to measure attribution and voter sentiment on the digital landscape. So very similar to polling. But, basically we can serve a survey out to you to the people who have seen your ads and the people who haven’t, who might still be in your audience be potential voters for your cause. We can ask things like, how do you do? Are you planning on voting? Are you registered to vote? Do what issues do you care about? And then you know, the, the useful thing that we can do is that we can retarget users based on how they answer or we can suppress them. So for example, if they’re not planning on voting, or they’re not registered, and they missed the deadline to register, Fine, let’s let’s suppress those users. And let’s make sure we’re retargeting users who say I’m interested in voting. I’m interested in these causes. Let’s retarget them with a CTV ad basically saying like, “here’s more information about the causes or a display ad saying like, don’t forget the election is on this date. Make sure you get out there.”
Ryan (00:21:01)
Yeah, I think this is gonna be a great tool for political advertisers. And it’s something that we’re looking at, that we that we’re going to be using more and more for, for our clients. I think for a couple of reasons. One of them hits on what we were talking about earlier, which is just a great greater uptake of digital video usage and platforms, right. So we’ve seen this anecdotally that there’s been a noticeable shift really in the last year or two, where you’ve, you know, we would launch, when we launch a digital video campaign, we typically launch pretty full barrel, between programmatic video and CTV, and we really commit to it. And we put a lot of frequency. And we really focus a lot on getting right good reach and frequency on people who are streaming TV viewers we talked about earlier, as well as people that consume video on their phones and in apps and things like that. And I can pretty much guarantee you that within two or three days after a digital video campaign starts for one of our clients, our I will get an email or a text from our clients saying, I went to my kids swim, swim meet this weekend, and two people told me they saw my ad. And that was normal for TV. It was not the case for digital video until very recently. And it’s anecdotal. But we also see it in polling lift in projects that I’ve been doing recently. So I think it’s very clear that we are starting to hit a critical mass of devices in people’s homes, and people are consuming media and this way, and we can reach, we can get reach and frequency with video digital video quickly in ways that we couldn’t before. And I think Brand Lift studies will be a very important part of showing that attribution.
Matt (00:22:48)
Fantastic. You know what, I think that’s a perfect stopping point, just for a quick break in this episode. And what we’ll do is when we come back, we’ll look at more in-depth strategies and takeaways that marketers can employ for the upcoming elections and other political campaigns. So we’ll take a quick break, and we will be right back.
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Matt (00:23:45)
Welcome back, everyone. In this half of the episode, let’s talk strategy for our listeners, Ryan, and Katrina. What are some strategies and tactics that you would recommend political marketers focus on in the coming months? And, Ryan, you and I were discussing this beforehand, but because your agency focuses so much on sort of that top funnel awareness, you know, what are some tactics that should be prioritized to really make the most effective use of your advertising dollars that are going to drive the optimal results?
Ryan (00:24:17)
Yeah, I mean, I think well, there I think you have, you know, you have two things to think about broadly, right? You have to use a commercial advertising term, the creative, right, which can translate that into political talk would be the message, right? What’s the message going to be? And then the media side, which is how are we going to deliver it to people? And so I think, you know, one thing I think all advertisers, political advertisers really need to think about is some of these political creative tropes that have become recycled over and over are they really effective anymore, and I would say that they’re probably Not and I’ll give you an example. Because you’ve seen this, like 100 times, you know, the political candidate staring off into the distance in slow motion. But your candidates, not Chuck Yeager. All right. So putting them in slow motion doesn’t really make them heroic. It just makes your ads slow and boring, right? That’s just one of many of these sorts of tropes. So I think people need to political advertisers need to take a step back. Let’s learn who our candidates are. What’s good about them? What’s the best thing about them that voters would like to know? And then let’s construct that story in video. And then let’s let’s construct it in video that fits the inventory that we are going to advertise on. Right? Well, one of the trends that we see a lot is these, you know, two-and-a-half or three-minute videos, it’s very fashionable right now, primarily, because it’s very profitable for agencies that make poor videos, they tend to be very boring, they would be great. If they stopped after about 45 seconds, they tend to throw the kitchen sink into these things. And they don’t fit any ad inventory, from an advertising perspective, usually completely worthless. And so I think we need to, you know, agencies need to think about creative, right, we spend a lot of money on telling the positive side of somebody’s story. And I see way too many political ads that don’t make me think positively about a candidate because of poor production, because of poor scripting, because people just didn’t put the necessary thought into, how are we going to construct the story? What’s the best thing about this candidate as our product, like an advertiser, like a commercial advertiser would? So that’s the first thing. And then obviously, when you’re thinking about okay, well, then how do we make our story fit at inventory? Then you need to think about, okay, what’s our advert? What’s our media strategy? Do we need a you know, just does a two and a half minute video? How much inventory for that? Is there? How are we going to get it in front of people? Yeah. Okay. Is it only going to go on TV? In which case it should probably be 30? Are we going to do digital? So we need to create, you know, fifteens, we need some, you know, what kind of content fits this? How are we going to tell the story of who this person is. So you need to be addressing messaging, creative, try to break the mould a little bit, try to get through all the noise of all the other advertisers. And do it in a way that is integral with the overall media plans.
Katrina (00:27:24)
Yep, yeah. And just following up on that, that’s a great way to summarize it, Ryan, the media and then also the creative on the creative front. It’s hard to fundraise for candidates often, but even on the smaller budgets, you have to put the budget into the creative because ultimately, that’s what your voters are seeing. So you know, always make sure you have, if you can, high-quality creative, but on top of that, and this is more of a pet peeve of mine that I’ve been telling a lot of clients, not everyone knows when the election is, especially if it’s a primary or if it’s some sort of bill that’s being heard, and they need to call their senator or something like that. But even even you assume people know when the general election is, that’s not always true. So I always recommend remind people when the election is, put that in your creative. And then on the media side, you just need to be everywhere. You need to be on linear, you need to be on programmatic, you need to be on social, you need to be on search, and all of the other formats mail, because people receive not everyone is on every single format. Some people you know, have AdBlock on and they can’t, they can’t see a display ad. But they’re watching Hulu, and they don’t have that on their TV. So you can reach them that way. And some people throw away their mail, when they when they get any sort of political mail ballots, and some people don’t have cable. So you need to make sure you’re trying to reach people in every possible format and persuade them to vote.
Ryan (00:28:47)
Yeah, you know, Katrina hit on a couple of really important things there. I think for agent ad agencies to think about. One of them is good creative, right? There is a tendency in political advertising to treat creative, like a commodity, and media inventory. Like it’s not a commodity, when like data treat data, like it’s something special that everyone doesn’t have access to these days. That’s about 10 years ago, right? I mean, there’s really great modeling available if you want it to just about everybody, right? The creative is so important. And as a thought experiment, when people asked me about this, I say, well, let’s let’s do this thought experiment. So you know, everything, everything that you put in front of your voter needs to be persuasive. And if it’s not, it doesn’t matter that it’s cheap. If you didn’t pay much for it, you still wasted all the money. You just paid them because it doesn’t persuade anyone. And there is a tendency for candidates to always be looking to cut corners and cut the budgets and things like that and both consulting partners and clients that we work with an agency themselves need to always remember that creative is king. It is what it is how you are presenting yourself to your voters. It’s how you’re trying to persuade them. It’s how you’re trying to motivate them. If it’s bad, it doesn’t matter that you only played 6000 instead of 12,000. It’s still bad. So that was the first one. The other great one that Katrina hit on was understanding that people consume things in different platforms, right? To just put yourself one of the things that we do at bullhorns that I learned from my time in the commercial industry is, you know, the beginning of every planning process should be imagining yourself as your target voter, right? And imagine, like in 2020, and in 2018, both the target battleground voter was 60%, female, affluent, suburban, right? So imagine yourself in her life, right? Like, what kinds of things does she watched as she read her mail? You know, what other kinds of does she when she gets into a car? Is she listening to talk radio, or she listened to digital audio or some combination thereof. And when you do that process, it really forces you to really think about how people actually live their lives. And that enables you to put together a more sophisticated media plan along the lines of what could Katrina describes, right? You take an example, like connected TV, you know, we’re up in America, somewhere, probably between 20, and 25%, are just total cord cutters. And Katrina probably knows that data a little bit better than me, maybe that’s even a little bit dated. But then you have a much bigger group of people, that stream on ad-supported streaming networks, that we can target with CTV, but they also have cable, or they also have satellite. And they kind of do both. And they also vote by mail, and you send them a mail piece, and they kind of save it for when they’re filling out their ballot, right. Most people live life in this fluid combination of channels that they pay attention to. So being able to kind of layer impressions on people is really the critical element of a really good, effective, cohesive political campaign.
Matt (00:32:13)
Well, I think what we can do is head into our last question here, and I’d love to hear from both of you and look forward to, you know, 2022, 2023, subsequent years, you know, what are some trends that you’re noticing in the political advertising space? And moreover, what are you focusing on and preparing for, that political marketers should be aware of? And finally, what do you predict the future is going to look like for political advertising? You know, especially with all these things that are emerging today? What does the future look like?
Ryan (00:32:50)
What Katrina, which one of us should go first on the, please predict a future question? I mean, we’re both we’re both pretty cool, but I don’t know if we can predict the future, exactly.
Katrina (00:33:00)
Do you want to take this on?
Ryan (00:33:01)
Okay, I guess.
Katrina (00:33:03)
Throwing you under.
Ryan (00:33:06)
I mean, you know, I think I think we probably know, a couple of things with a fair amount of certainty. And one of them, let’s say two things, let’s think about TV. In particular, one of them is that streaming television is going to continue to grow in the television marketplace. And the reason for that is very simple, that is a superior product, it is more convenient, and it is cheaper. Although all the different streaming companies trying to compete each against each other and charge you $7 and $9, you know, separately, it’s all of a sudden becoming maybe not quite so much cheaper. But that said, you know, you just walk into a Walmart, go back to the electronics section, every single TV on there’s gonna have a sticker on it that says, you know, wired for Hulu, Amazon Prime, Roku, firestick, all included, you know, right. They all every TV sold in America pretty much these days is a smart TV. And when you take it home and you plug it in, it is easier to connect it to your Wi-Fi router than it is to call the Cable Guy and pay them $100 to come out and wait for two days. You know what I’m saying? Like, it is a superior product. That’s number one. So the usage of that is going to continue to grow. I think number two, the cable companies are not going to and they are not sitting around just watching their business model die. They’re not just sitting around waiting to go out of business. Right? So if you look at big players like Comcast, right, they own streaming services, they’re buying more streaming services, right. So there’s going to be this very volatile marketplace as as not only the different companies compete, but the infrastructures that they are tied to compete in As an advertiser, if you’re doing a good job for your clients, and you want to win your races, and you want to give your clients that extra edge, you better keep up on it, you better understand you better understand the limitations of traditional cable and what satellites good at and where you can buy it where it doesn’t make sense, better understand penetration rate, you better really, you know, get away from focusing so much on points and really look at combined reach and frequency and impression stack. Right? I think that’s, that’s what were those two things are really driving how we advertise what abroad, they call television and video into the future.
Katrina (00:35:32)
Yeah, I’ll actually take it in a different direction. And just from the programmatic and digital perspective, you know, Google announced that they’re getting rid of the cookie, they’re going to be doing some alternate solutions to that, you know, that’s a little bit down the line, that’s a couple years down the line. But you know, everyone’s worried about that, especially in political because political is all about, like, targeting, you know, likely voters using those 3rd-party data partners to make sure that you’re targeting likely voters, and if the cookie goes away, then how are you going to target people? So CTV is going to be even bigger, CTV is one way to to make sure you can still target based on device ID, for example. And then on top of that contextual solutions, or at least you’re going to need to find partners in the digital space that are ready for the decline of the cookie. So targeting, can you based on what people are looking up online, targeting them on specific URLs, like let’s say you’re you’re trying to target for a mayoral race in a certain city, you’ll just try and find a way to hit those URLs that are specifically like this city’s mayoral race, like any sort of news article about that you want your ad to show up there. And we’re already doing things like that. StackAdapt. But I do you think contextual targeting is going to become a much bigger deal. And then finally, voter lists. So voter lists are already huge and political. But especially with the decline of the cookie, we’re gonna have to find different ways to match those users online, and voter lists and CRM data is going to be probably the next big thing. It’s always been big, but it’s it’s gonna have a resurgence.
Matt (00:37:04)
Well, thank you so much, Ryan. And thank you, Katrina. That was fantastic. And you know what, it’s been great having you both on the episode. And to all of our listeners. I hope that you found this episode as insightful as I did. On behalf of StackAdapt. We wish you nothing but success in your upcoming campaigns. And we’ll see you in the next episode of The How Agencies Thrive podcast. Thanks so much.
Episode Outro (00:37:31)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcast on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to learn how agencies or brands work with StackAdapt, find us at www.stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
