Are We Overestimating Cord-Cutting?
Digital media people love talking about cord-cutting and how the old broadcast model is disappearing for what we used to consider “TV.” But Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan’s POV in MediaPost last week reminds us that cord-cutting is not universal, and the reach of broadcast TV is still massive (and concentrated, for popular TV programs). Morgan’s call? “TV advertising has a marketing problem.” Yeah, it’s more fun to talk about cord-cutting (or at least the AdMonsters team seems to think so), but let’s not rush to imagine living, breathing audiences have dropped dead already.
Are We Overestimating Buying Based on Values, Too?
On a similar tack, there’s some interesting back-and-forth in The Drum about whether David Ogilvy’s philosophy has a place in the 21st-century marketplace. Ogilvy’s main goal was to move units. Should we be following his model in an era when people buy based on their values, and the values businesses seem to share with them or help them communicate, rather than the strength of the products themselves? Or–counterpoint–is selling your values still ultimately about moving units?
The Scope of the Zirconium Fraud Network
Confiant’s blog goes into fairly extensive detail about Zirconium, which ran a huge, wide-reaching malvertising operation in 2017. It’s worth checking out to get a sense of what publishers have to guard against these days. Publishers’ security methods are getting more robust, sure, but as a reaction, fraudsters are launching these forced redirect campaigns that evade existing security solutions. Zirconium itself ran 28 fraudulent ad agencies and reached 62% of all ad-supported sites per week. If you have a minute for a long read, this explains how they did it.