Today's guest is Justin Lebbon
(Justin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-lebbon-9b70484/ )
Justin is the founder of the Future of TV Advertising conference series, which brings together broadcasters, agencies, advertisers, and technology companies in markets including the UK, Australia, and Canada.
Justin is also the co-host of the Media Unfiltered podcast, a podcast covering the big issues shaping advertising and media, often co-hosted by Ian Whittaker, who was a guest on this podcast in episode two.
(Media unfiltered podcast - https://media-unfiltered.com/ )
Back to Justin.
Justin has an unusually broad vantage point on the industry. He spends his year talking to people across different parts of the TV advertising ecosystem in different markets and hearing where they agree, where they disagree, and where they're still trying to work out the answers. So I thought Justin would be the perfect person to help sort through some of the puzzles, problems, and messes facing television advertising today. It's a wide-ranging conversation, and covers:
- The challenge facing premium local television as media globalises and video inventory proliferates
- Why a flat TV advertising market means broadcasters need to grow the market, not simply fight each other for share
- Broadcaster collaboration as a strategic imperative
- Moving beyond reliance on the major agency holding companies and pursuing the “messy middle” of advertisers
- Making TV dramatically easier to buy — common platforms, consistent audience data and simpler transactions
- The opportunity to unlock SME advertising through self-service platforms
- Why broadcasters need to retain greater control of their inventory, pricing, data and customer relationships
- How broadcaster sales organisations need to evolve beyond traditional agency trading relationships
- Going directly to advertisers — and what TV can learn from collaborative approaches in Norway and other markets
- The essential ingredients of broadcaster collaboration: politics, scale, common products and common measurement
- Competing for social-video spend by changing how television is measured
- TV’s “fashion problem” — why proven effectiveness alone hasn’t protected advertising share
- The economic and societal consequences of advertising expenditure migrating to global technology platforms
- Defining and defending premium video through quality, trust, governance, transparency and independently verified measurement
- Why premium only matters if premium inventory is also simple to buy
- Why cross-media measurement may currently be more distraction than solution
- The need for broadcasters to diversify beyond advertising revenue
- What broadcasters can learn from NBCUniversal, Disney and The New York Times about fandom, events, subscriptions and brand extensions
- Why combining TV with radio and out-of-home capabilities may create stronger commercial models
- Justin’s ultimate conclusion: the answers may be relatively straightforward — execution and industry politics are the hard part