We knew when developing the agenda for OPS that we couldn’t just have operations people say that ops was sexy. We needed an icon in the industry to help drive that point home and end the day with everyone buzzing about all the great things operations is. We were extremely fortunate to be able to get Jack Myers, media economist and chairman of the Media Advisory Group to help us end a fantastic day and really drive the point home.
We continue the conversation with Jack Myers, media economist and chairman of the Media Advisory Group and Rob Beeler at the OPS NY event. During the wrap up session they discussed media, transparency, apps, paywalls and of course, why ops is sexy. This blog is the last in a five part series. Watch the video and read the transcript of the presentation.
In this post Jack discusses data, privacy, and trafficking ads.
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Rob: I love again the theme of ops sitting at the table—that’s kind of what Admonsters has been about for quite some time, and…
Jack: Well, with all the sexiness I see in this room…
{Talking at once}
Rob: That being said, the speed and change that’s going on throws all of us. I would say probably one of the number one topics when we were putting together the events is data, and yet people aren’t really ready to necessarily engage on that conversation yet because they haven’t figured that out yet. There’s no recipe around that, so I was going to ask you about that. In terms of this move toward a data-driven place, and the dangers and opportunities, is that good for media companies?
Jack: Well, the increase in the amount of data really sucks for the traditional media companies because they’ve been very very successful for a very long time with age, gender, and household data. Nielsen has built a huge business on simplicity…Nielsen has basically made a business saying we can’t do that. And the buyers and the sellers have basically colluded to say yeah, they can’t do that, and we’re very happy with that; we’re making millions and millions of dollars in a model where data is just the fundamental currency that’s needed for the buying and selling transaction to assure what’s being bought is what’s being delivered. Now we’re getting all this knowledge coming out of data. And knowledge is often a very dangerous…
Rob: Exactly, because of the way the Internet evolved, in other words you would think that, had the right powers been, we’d all have colluded and said, you know what, we can’t figure out behavioral targeting…
Jack: If it were up to Nielsen, Nielsen bought NetRatings, if they could have bought Comsquared, they would have, but you have basically two providers, and now you’ve got Quantcast and all these other providers. You’ve got DoubleVerfiy developing audit models, you’ve got so many different companies out there developing data and essentially offering it for free, and marketers are suddenly getting clued in and saying, well what else can we learn, what else can we know, and they’re putting demands on agencies, agencies can’t find the profit model behind that. So again, we’re in the middle of this hugely transformative period and process and I don’t think we really know where the data model is going to fall out. We know it’s going to become much more sophisticated, we know that data is going to be at the foundation, but I don’t look at data as much as I look at crowd formation.
And I think we’re going to be looking less and less at the household-specific data and less and less at cookies and less and less at targeted delivery by usage behavioral patterns, and more and more at where are crowds forming and what kind of content are crowds forming behind. And then as a marketer, how do I associate with those audiences through the media brands. So I think we’re going to continue to have the highly commoditized, extremely low cost, highly—incredibly high—so efficient, low-cost, and commoditized. I’m saying three different ways.
It’s going to be cheap media that’s going to be data-driven, and then we’re going to see new currencies building up around the value of the content brands. And that’s AOL’s—AOL completely believes this is Tim Armstrong’s mantra right now. Build the content brands, demonstrate that we can draw definable audiences, measurable audiences to those content brands, and then allow advertisers and marketers to integrate with that content and communicate socially with the consumers of those brands.
Rob: When you talk about the crowd-sourcing, and not paying as much of a—the cookies—what mainly comes to my mind is all the privacy concerns and all the potential regulations. It almost seems to me like we’ve gotten ourselves into the weeds and our doing things, not communicating it out to the rest of the world. So, we look creepy; we’re not sexy, we’re creepy in that environment with the whole privacy issues. And perhaps, what I heard you say around the crowd-sourcing sounds like a much more attractive way to talk about that and maybe go, but I have a feeling we’re still gonna have to go through this privacy storm that’s…
Jack: I’m a little surprised, frankly, that privacy hasn’t reared its ugly head in this election campaign. I thought the democrats would use it as a way to move the needle away from some of the other social issues that the republicans are focusing on.
Rob: {? Chapelle?} one of our lead keynotes said, if health care doesn’t go through, you’ll see the privacy thing go through, because it’ll hit a, there will be a fall-back. And I think that’s a thing our whole industry has to realize. It is really one political storm away from being an easy win for somebody.
Jack: The IAB, to their credit, and the ANA, the Four As, a lot of trade associations are working very hard to communicate with Washington and to get ahead of the privacy issue. But it’s a really, really dangerous road to go down, and it’s so easily politicized, because no matter how much you do to protect the privacy of individual households, once you’re attaching a cookie to something, the cat’s out of the bag. And on the other side of the coin, you see all the arguments that say young people really don’t care about privacy, but the government is not made up of young people. And I just think there has not yet been a real clearly delineated political message to Washington that’s resonated to prevent them from going in that direction. Once they go in that direction, I think it’ll be tough to get the cat back in the bag. It’s kind of like there’s a yellow flag up there to the industry right now, and I think the industry, as opposed to slowing down and saying we’re going to stop, is speeding up and trying to find a way through the yellow light.
Rob: So I’m going to assume, Jack, that you’ve never actually trafficked an ad.
Jack: No, that’s actually not true. When I was at…
Rob: I’ve got a laptop right here…
Jack: {Addressing the crowd} I could not even begin to do what you guys do or to understand; I could not talk your language. I give you an enormous amount of credit, but in my days at CBS, when I was retail sales manager for Channel 2 in New York, every Friday I used to go into the traffic department when my friend who was head of traffic was still there and everyone else had left, and I would log onto the system—believe it or not, one of the first computer systems in the television industry—and we used to log into the system and move all of my clients into the best pod positions over the weekend.
Rob: So you completely made me change my segue, which was, but now you say you are ops, so you’re sexy, too…
{Talking at once}
Rob: Thinking of your perspective on the industry and looking at all these sexy ops people as they’re going through and trying to make changes, any thoughts for them in terms of what they should be thinking, they should be doing?
Jack: You could follow my lead, and if when the head of sales or sales guy walks in wants to adjust something, just make sure he or she is carrying a bottle of tequila for you, because that was my secret.
Rob: Speaking of drinking…
{Talking at once}
Rob: We have to do this again, Jack. First of all, I want to thank you…
{Applause}
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
We knew when developing the agenda for OPS that we couldn’t just have operations people say that ops was sexy. We needed an icon in the industry to help drive that point home and end the day with everyone buzzing about all the great things operations is. We were extremely fortunate to be able to get Jack Myers, media economist and chairman of the Media Advisory Group to help us end a fantastic day and really drive the point home. We continue the conversation with Jack Myers, media economist and chairman of the Media Advisory Group and Rob Beeler at the OPS NY event. During the wrap up session they discussed media, transparency, apps, paywalls and of course, why ops is sexy. This blog is the last in a five part series. Watch the video and read the transcript of the presentation.