OWM voices criticism in Germany of developments in the advertising-financed TV market
On June 20 and 21, the who’s who of TV marketing will gather in Germany for the Screenforce Days. While the focus there is on their own successes, the Organization of Advertisers in the Brand Association (OWM) is rubbing salt in the wound by criticizing current developments that have been working against advertising companies for years.
Uwe Storch, Deputy Chairman of the OWM, said in a press release on Monday: "The net reach of advertising-financed private television is still in decline and advertising blocks are continuously losing performance. The reliability of TV as the most important reach medium continues to decline, while the costs for advertising companies are rising significantly. This is reducing the effectiveness and efficiency of TV, which remains a very important medium for advertisers. We expect TV providers to face up to the challenges with all their might and deliver future-oriented solutions."
The OWM's points of criticism and demands in detail:
1. predictability and reliability of TV suffers
In the past, the predictability of advertising pressure was reliably high. This is hardly the case today. Serious fluctuations in the performance of occupied environments lead to unsatisfactory planning results. The necessary balancing of performance during the campaign period often fails to materialize and thus increasingly jeopardizes the overall success of a campaign.
The OWM calls on television providers to ensure greater planning security and to guarantee compensation for performance deficits within the respective campaign period.
2. stop hyperinflation and loss of reach
Unsteady and weak reach developments as well as losses in campaign net reach in many target groups require ever higher investment sums. The price-performance ratio is developing to the disadvantage of advertisers and the ROI is inevitably falling. But that's not all: with the hyperinflation of gross spot prices completely decoupled from the overall economic development in Germany, linear television is losing its central USP in terms of investment security compared to other players in the advertising market.
The OWM is calling for an end to the hyperinflation of gross spot prices and an appropriate price-performance development.
3. private TV must fight for its viewers
Loss of reach to streaming providers and digital players is also the responsibility of advertising-financed TV providers. Examples from the traditional broadcasting landscape show how successfully offerings can hold their own and even grow in an increasingly fragmented environment if they focus on their brand core, invest in the programs and are innovative.
The OWM calls on the advertising-financed private broadcasters to increase their commitment to combating the loss of reach through sustainable brand positioning and the strengthening of their program offerings in competition.
4. anachronistic performance measurement
In the digital age, TV planning with average spot reach in a block is no longer up to date. At the latest with the introduction of addressable TV, the spot reach of a campaign can no longer be calculated using the usual practice of block reach in the traditional TV world. Advertisers need a consistent performance evaluation on a spot basis across all moving image formats and channels.
The OWM is calling for campaigns to be billed on an individual spot basis.
5. make online video inventories measurable
TV formats are increasingly being recycled or extended online to achieve the desired reach. Until now, the measurability of these offers has been severely limited or only possible via unsuitable interfaces and with a loss of quality using VPAID. With the development of the VAST 4.0 measurement script, cleaner and more reliable measurements are now possible.
The OWM demands comprehensive measurement options for online video inventories on all end devices. In addition to visibility measurements, brand safety measures and fraud detection as well as audience verification for online moving images must be made possible immediately.
6 Addressable TV: Standardization and 3rd party measurement
Addressable TV enables the advertising use of a linear channel with almost all digital possibilities. So far, however, there has been a lack of harmonized systems with which the advertising material can be played out to all TV channels via one system. This results in "walled gardens" despite the uniform HbbTV transmission standard. Cross-campaign tracking, measurements of dwell time and interaction rates are also not possible across marketers and are therefore not comparable. However, transparency and measurability are essential in order to be able to carry out evaluations and better locate the contribution of the channel in the media mix.
The OWM calls on marketers to create a standard for the display of advertising media and to enable cross-marketer verification by third-party providers.
7 AGF must finally do its homework
Serious mishaps by contracted service providers, inadequate quality assurance, allocation errors and the insufficient number of cases in the AGF panel weaken AGF's reputation. The increasing fragmentation of the video market can no longer be adequately represented by the panel size, which has remained unchanged for over 20 years. The AGF must push much harder to increase the size of its panel.
The integration of non-linear video offerings is too slow and urgently needs to be harmonized with other market initiatives (AGOF). The major marketers as shareholders of AGF and AGOF are called upon to ensure harmonization in video streaming measurement.
The OWM is calling for the rapid expansion of the AGF reach model in order to adequately reflect the entire breadth and depth of the video market in both qualitative and quantitative terms. In addition, the OWM is calling for the harmonization of video streaming measurement in the market.
