A Thanksgiving Special Served up with Sara Fischer

off with a shout out. So for all of our at Landia listeners, we all know we're big fans of Laura CURRENTI I am particularly and Laura's going to kill me and be embarrassed for this, but I am particularly proud of my friend, my partner, my colleague, who last

week was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Achievement. Huge congratulations, Laura, like an achievement that is, thank you for being my partner for five seven, seven years, because there are so many things that, um, we're recognized that we built together.

That we're back Thanksgiving week, Happy Thanksgiving at Landia. We're bringing back Sarah Fisher, media reporter over at Axios to talk about the state of the industry as we go into the holiday season, specifically like talking about Facebook, which is something that like we can't ignore everybody's reporting on it and what's happening, and that kind of explosive report

that The New York Times put out last week. I just think that, like from a brand perspective, from a media agency perspective, this gets even more interesting on how agencies are going to handle this stuff. And Sarah gets into it a bit and also talks about their new show on HBO. So really excited to have her with that. Atlantia. We hope you enjoy this special at Landia look at What's Happening in the industry with Sarah Fisher. We'll be right back. We have one of our favorite people returning

for the third time. Magic number three. Sarah Fisher, Media reporter at Axio. Sarah, welcome, Thank you so much for having me. Good morning. Good morning, So Sarah, a lot of news coming out of Menlo Park around Facebook and know you've been covering this latest news. Can you give our listeners a high level overview of what's going on

with Facebook and how the industry is reacting. Absolutely so The New York Times published a damning report last week that essentially said that some of these books top leaders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Cheryl Sandberg, were negligent in the way that they handled stake news, misinformation, election medaling, privacy, data security, a whole bunch of issues. Now, of course, executives came back swinging punches, saying that's just not true.

We've made mistakes, but we've learned from them. But what we're seeing now is that for the first time, advertisers are starting to really think critically about whether or not they should be spending on these platforms. In the past, we didn't see ads spend it all that much in wake of Russian meddling or Cambridge Analytica. But now analysts are saying that they expect advertisers to begin to take

a closer look at this. And when you talk to some of the biggest ad spenders for Facebook, so some of the folks that run the big agency holding group, these executives are saying, look, we don't trust anymore that Facebook is a place that has good values and has good brand value for our clients, and that is a very serious threat to Facebook's ad revenue. How does try nine team planning unfold if agencies and brands decide they've

had enough. Well, I think, first of all, the timing of this is interesting because, as you mentioned, it is planning seasons, but a lot of those ur fps that begin January one have been science fils and delivered. So my assumption is that by Q one you're not going to see a huge difference spending, And my assumption is that it's Facebook can figure out a way to manage this crisis, then maybe you don't see this happen in

Q two. I think what you're going to see is that advertisers are going to look eventually at shifting their spend to places where they can do target advertising, but they're going to have to figure out how they can do it at scale. I mean, that's the value at it Facebook. Two billion people are users not just across Facebook, but also across Instagram and some of their messaging apps.

So expect advertisers to dump more money into places like Google, so Google News and Google Search where they're not facing as great as brand safety problems, but you can still target people at scale, But also expect them to take some of those dollars and put them in other places where they can target people from digital. But maybe the skill isn't as good, but at least it's a little

bit of whoop round safe. So I'm thinking about things like connected TV, addressable advertising, maybe some new up and coming platforms where people are spending a ton of time, like a flipboard or maybe even a TikTok. That's what I would expect to happen in the market. And then of course you're always going to have people that say, you know what, forget about digital, I'm gonna double down on TV and billboards and other sorts of things. But

I'd expect that slowly over time. If Facebook can't manage this, the money will blow somewhere else. I mean, it's a huge opportunity, right for competitors. I think I was listening to The Daily and they had a great clip of Tim Cook basically saying we are not going to sell your information. We are not in the business of you, right, We're in the business. And I think that like that is going to become a kind of a resounding talk track for a lot of their competitors. Um to gain

more advertisers and to gain more spend. Is that true? I think that's I mean, we interviewed Tim Cooks for our Access on HBO show and one of the things he mentioned is that, you know, Apple has never really been an advertising business. They've always been a hardware business. But we know that the iPhone sales are plateauing and that growth is decelerating for some of their hardware products,

sympically do to saturation. I mean, most people already have functioning iPhones, so they're trying to picket to software sales, which means that you're selling subscriptions to apps. You're trying to get people to spend more time with things like iTunes or whatever it may be. But this trend that you're seeing people shifting into not just software sales, but you know, digital potentially ad based software sales is not just native to Apple. We see Microsoft doubling down on this.

To remember, they acquired linked In and now making close to two billion in advertising from LinkedIn. So I think you're right. I think that people are going to look at what's happening in Facebook competitors and say, how can we learn from this, How can we potentially scoop up

some of that revenue by marketing. Our products is being branded safe as being value based, and it's not just going to be your other digital players like Twitter and Google as you mentioned with Apple, it could also be some of the more traditional you know, Harvard players are looking to get into software. That's been an opening here.

What about a potential pivot back to traditional mediums, non digital platforms like radio and TV and out of home And one of the things that we've been following is the need to find a one to one engagement and going deeper into more contextual targeting, creating communities, building conversations. What does that look like? Because I think this highlights, uh, some of the issues in sort of mass digital scale

UM platforms. I definitely think that some of the traditional ad platforms that are digitized thing or on the rucks if you take a look at out of home. Out of home has been growing year over year because billboards and subway posters are all becoming digital and thus they can be bought and sold programmatically. In fact, a lot of those companies I think are going to thrive in the driverless car era because they're so location based. As the data that they have they will be able to

maximize through partnerships with other platforms. As far as where other of traditional media platforms are going, I mean, the same thing is happening with TV. It's becoming more addressable, it's going over the top, and so eventually you'll find a world in which all television advertising is bought and sold programmatically, and I think that people will be shifting

their dollars there. Radio is an interesting one that I am curious to see what happens, and that's because as we're seeing with revenue trends and user trends, terrestrial terrestrial radio is having a tough time. Streaming podcasts, those are doing very well, but regular radio that you're listening to their car is not experiencing as much growth simply because people are tuning into digital alternatives. So my long answer if you're short question is anything that's going digital, people

will invest their dollars there. But if you're not innovating and going digital, you're just those traditional ad mediums. We're not going to exceed dollar spite. It's every ad medium that is a digital medium at risk for the type of fraud and the type of issues that we've seen on a scale like Facebook. Absolutely, I'm gonna be writing about this uh in my newsletter that connected TV is basically an ad fraud scheme right now, anytime you're not

buying one to one, you're not buying direct. You have a broken supply chain, you have middlemen that make you more susceptible to fraud schemes and to complications, and so I would absolutely anticipate that as more advertising goes automated, you're gonna just have an increase in fraud and increasing complications. The good news is though, that I think more and more people are starting to look at programmatic direct, which is where you use programmatic infrastructure to target ads, but

you're still selling them one on one. You see this with ad vendors using something called ad dot t f T. While this isn't totally direct, it's essentially saying to the publishers, you have to pre approve the vendors that are you're going to be working with. And I think steps like that will help reduce fraud. But it's something that the industry is always going to have to monitor as more

ad mediums move digital. So you were just talking about the idea of TV becoming addressable, or that all television advertising has the potential to become automated. Are we at all worried about the backlash that that creates. I think some of the things that we've heard in the market, and going to Lyndia Karino's State of the Industry forum last year was around the idea that a few or more contextual ads presents, you know, a more favorable experience

for consumers. Are you hearing anything around that and do you think that that could create a larger pushback in that it kicks over to the subscription side. Yeah, I think so. I think we'll consumer hate advertising. That's why subscription based platforms are on the rise. That's why Netflix do so well is because we've become a tuned, especially younger generations, to to add out. We don't want to

have to be bothered by them. The problem is that once you do get to an era where we are all attached to five G, where streaming becomes the default because linear is too slow, there is going to be

a fundamental shift in how television advertising is purchased. Right now, about ten of television advertising is bought through advanced channels, what a be programmatic or addressable or a little o t T expect that in the coming years to shift closer to one hundred, and when it does, you as a marketer are not going to be able to necessarily buy that massive scale ads day parted the way that you used to, and you're just going to have to

adjust now. I do think that the market will adjust a little bit itself, meaning that even though there are going to be a lot of opportunities to target people in a really niche way, there's still going to be opportunities to hit people cheaply for a big scale buy. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like because we haven't really seen it yet. You know, addressable still so small, but I think that eventually, for people who need to market goods at scale, the opportunity will

be there. How do you think that impacts the creative industry right? Because the types of ads in the digital space, there's the nimbleness and the ability to shift in that sort of creative development. But when it comes to creating something on air, typically the process is much more complex. Do you think that you know, agencies in particular, and our content studio sitting within, you know, networks and publishers have to think about what that creative world looks like,

oh absolutely. I mean there's two big things here. The first is that digital allows you to optimize in real time. You could do a small test buy on digital, see which creatives work for which audiences, and optimize and change your creative. And by the way, there will be a time when AI will help you optimize your creative. You can swap in the color of a sweater or the

tone of somebody's voice to make it more appealing. I think too, if you're a brand, you've had to worry about making sure that you're advertising is household friendly and family friendly. And I think you know, addressable advertising is going to mean that you can target your creative a little bit more acutely. And even if you look at some grants who are trying to make sure that their product is marketed in a way that's appeasing to the whole family, they might not have to worry about it

as much in a DPC world. So I do think you're right that creative will adapt and change to be more customized and to be less focused on pleasing every single member of the family because they're going to have the opportunity to target a little bitter. Do you think that you know, brands like maybe the P and G S and the Nest Lease and the Mars and all those folks that are looking for scale will also start

using addressable to do more testing. Yeah, I mean I think that pretty much what's going to happen is that people right now the way, especially if you talk to political campaigns, you use digital as last you see what creative resonates, and then you apply those learnings to traditional

media so GEO, t V or you know, television. I wouldn't surprise me if you start to see the opposite happen as well, where now that the barrier to entry for television comes way down, more people can afford advertising on TV, people will use addressable TV AD budgets to test and optimize for digital platforms or O T T or whatever it might be. So I definitely think that's

coming down the pike. I think at the end of the day, everything goes digital AD medium that was ever traditional becomes digital or dies or devolved to be something that's more digital like, and eventually you're going to be able to save your planner. I want a test budget

across medium. Here's a hundred thousand dollars to test and then you can funnel down and say, all right, well, this digital ad performs really well on streaming, this digital ads performed really well on digital billboards, and you'll be able to narrow down which mediums you spend with after doing a one broad digital test. I think that's the future.

One note on that, though, I think is interesting is that you know, for print it's still a place where even digital brands take out full page ads to make a statement when you think about the number of brands asking for more experiential and how I would think about it from a planning standpoint is moving to a place where there's complementary offline online builds, where all of a sudden we move away from channel planning and we start

thinking about ecosystem I think that's right. I we read a poll for Actis a couple of days ago and it basically suggested that more people are craving in person communication, and I think the same thing is happening with marketing.

You have niche efficiency buys that are low funnel and digital, and because everything is going digital, everything moves to low funnel on digital and then you use what was top of the funnel, so you're broad based television targeting or newspaper ads they still exist in some cases, or quite frankly, top of the funnel totally evolved into something way more experiential.

So I remember Giant spoon Wire your agency did a live PD ad with Mass Mutual during New Year's V Right, that is something that marketers would need to thought about a couple of years ago. But we have to put so much more emphasis on top of the funnel experiential now that everything is going digital and everything is moving to the bottom of the funnel. And so what does

top of the funnel mean. I mean, it could be an experiential at on New Year's e it could be a massive billboard in times square are functionality, Yes, a newspaper takeover if people are still reading newspapers. It's anything that exactly has high level impact. And I think we spend so much time talking about what the bottom of that funnel is going to look like, how everything's moving digital.

But you're right, we're not spending enough time thinking about how this really changes the top of the funnel in ways that we don't even know yet well. And the idea that like an Alexa and I have spent our entire careers moving towards this non linear funnel, right, this idea that marketing is layered in nuanced and how do you have a mic drop complimented with you know, always on media and being comfortable with the fact that people are going to come into your brand however they want.

I think of one thing that's really interesting that you're implying, Sarah, And we've talked a lot about this with folks like Rachel Typograph, that marketers have underestimated the relationship between top of the funnel and lower funnel, right, And I think that that has fundamentally changed, but the market has actually been slow um to adjust for that, and you're seeing agencies and marketers actually shine through who understand it. So

I think it's a really interesting paradigm. Let's talk two seconds that we want to hear more about Axios on HBO speaking of traditional non traditional. Tell us more about the show. The show has been an interesting experience for everyone involved. I think one you take a bunch of print journalists and you try to make something for television, and you recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. And that's important not just for us, because it's opening up our

eyes to how we could improve our storytelling. But it's also I think good for HBO and other TV platforms that are trying to understand how print or text based news UH sees the framing of news. For so long on television, I would watch You Know Sixty Minutes or a few other news shows try to tackle these very serious but complicated topics for general American audience, and it's

hard to do it without dumbing it down. And we've kind of approached the show with the perspective of there's a way to tackle really high level issues that are important to everyday Americans without having to dumb it down, without having to address the biggest possible and whist audience. And so I think that's part of why we went

with HBO. HBO consumers pay for that experience. It's a premium cable channel and over the top experience, and our assumption was that people would want something that would talk about news of the day in a way that's sexy and interesting but not dumb down, and so far, I think it's working. I think some of the interviews that we've had and made news we interviewed can cook. This past episode, we interview Donald Trump, our first episode. I think people like it so so far, the experience has

been wonderful. We're very grateful to HBO and all the efforts that they're putting into it and everything that they're teaching us about how we need to think about storytelling differently. You know, we don't really think about the visual aspects of all the time when we're writing stories. But now we see the power of some of these visual mediums. You know, we couldn't have walked through the Apple Garden and see how they're planning a are through test, like

that's something we could have only done their videos. I think for us, like we started the podcast because in fact we didn't want to go with video. The point is is also it's not just exploring new mediums, it's also what is right for the story. I think a lot of digital first media companies are starting to recognize that these over the top partnerships they're they're actually high

level marketing vehicles. You listen to meritithal Loving and from York Times on earnings casts, so tell you like their partnerships with Effects or you know, wherever they're running their tea shows. It's hyphonal branding. It's what's getting people who didn't normally pick up a paper or go to your own line exposed to you, and I think we are thinking about it in the same way. So, Sarah, what would you kill by d I y in the industry

as we close out? So from my kill, I wouldn't say that I would absolutely kill this, but maybe I could bend the rules and reevaluate my relationship and marketers relationship with Facebook. Given some of the headlines that we've been hearing, I think that it's only a matter of time that their brand value becomes a risk with your

brand value. If you're choosing to put your money where your mouth is and advocating for, you know, a transparent, transactional marketplace, then Facebook right now doesn't seem to be the best fit. But I understand that there's still a lot of marketing value and that it might not be easy to just pull every dollar. So I think I would not necessarily kill but reevaluate our relationship with Facebook when it comes to add them. Okay, what would you buy?

I would buy into anyone who's doing sports betting media. We just did a big set on this with active sports betting is going to explode. It's going to become a massive part of both media and sports revenue. And for those like I think about draft kings that are starting to create shows, CBS doing the same thing about how where you should be putting bets, the same thing with fantasy. By the way, that is a smart investment. It's only going to spike more states are going to

approve legislation that allows you to gamble. That's where I would invest. What would you do yourself? I think, especially ahead of the holiday season, there's a lot of books that I want to read, and I think that we should all be reading a little bit more. And that's the one thing I want to do myself is take some time to reflect, slow down and just you know, dive in to some really good books, especially once about

the industry. You know, kind of a lot of had that really great book front of these I think I want to pick it back up again, just to help me unwind and be more effective. So book clubs starting nineteen with Sarah Fisher. We'll have to come put the name for this, Sara Fisher. Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving. Thankful for you. Yes we are in this industry. Talk to you soon, Bye bye, Thank you for coming back. Sara, always so impressive, always so on top of what's going

on in the industry. It's such a clear kind of view. And we've got to get you to the five timers because now you're at the three time check four and five is on its way, and I think we should start this book club with Sara Fisher. It's a great idea. Anyway, we hope badly and you have an amazing Thanksgiving friends and family, take some time off the screen, get advice from Sarah Fisher, read a good book, industry or not, and we will be talking to you in another couple

of weeks. Big thanks for our producer Diana, Big thanks to all of our friends and family at Panoply. Happy Thanksgiving, gobble gobble m h Full disclosure. Our opinions are our own. H.