News You Can Use: Dec. 6 - 10

Dec 9

Busy professionals like you don't have time to search for what's important. That's why we do it for you. We curate the top headlines, best stories, and most insightful analysis of the week just for you...

This week, we’re looking at…

Connected TV Has a Consent Management Challenge (Digiday)

“There’s just this fallacy that we have solved for privacy, full stop. We have not. We’ve gotten mature and pretty standardized solutions for a couple platforms, but for the ones that everybody now gives a damn about — CTV and [streaming] — it’s still very much the Wild West,” said one media executive. While the media and advertising industry has been tackling those topics on the web and mobile, CTV presents a significant difference. Computers and phones are largely personal devices, so consent is managed at the individual level. CTV devices, however, are often shared by multiple members of a household. Therein lies the dilemma that the industry needs to address — and is now working to address.

Advertising’s Robust Recovery This Year Will Be Followed By Double-Digit Gains In 2022, Media Agencies Predict (Deadline)

Despite the rise of digital, many large companies and top-tier product launches rely heavily on television as well as ad-supported forms of streaming. But GroupM sees TV’s share of total campaigns shrinking in the coming years. TV advertising will reach $171 billion in 2022, with about 10% of that devoted to what the company calls “Connected TV+,” mainly ad-supported streaming, a category projected to triple to $33 billion by 2026.

Streaming Services Crash Linear's Holiday TV Programming Party (Adweek)

Those linear programming blocks have given advertisers an easy way to appear near holiday programming. While festive fare is key for streamers looking to grow subscribers and audiences, it remains challenging for buyers since they typically sell audience segments, not specific programming. “It isn’t like our clients are going to buy streaming services specifically to be in the holiday content since we can’t confirm that they will air in it,” one integrated investment lead at a holding company media agency, who asked to speak on background to speak freely about the trend, told Adweek. “To me, this is more about the streamers jumping on the bandwagon of easy-to-produce holiday movies that perform incredibly well with audiences.”

Netflix Originals Suffer Sharp Viewership Drop After Initial Surge (FierceVideo)

That’s according to new research from media analyst company Moffett Nathanson, which dug into Nielsen’s U.S. streaming data to get a clearer picture of how Netflix’s massive content budget is reflected in engagement. The company found that Netflix had 40 original shows that reached Nielsen’s top 10 list during the third quarter, but that none of them accounted for more than 1.5% of time spent on Netflix in the U.S. “This suggests that Netflix will need to continually refresh their original content pipeline to keep viewers engaged as they move from one original series to the next,” wrote Michael Nathanson in a research note.

How David Zaslav Plans to Combine Discovery and WarnerMedia to Unleash ‘Shock and Awe’ on the Streaming Wars (Variety)

One of Zaslav’s first big decisions will be whether to combine or keep separate the enlarged company’s two major streaming platforms: HBO Max and Discovery Plus. The name of the game now is subscriber gains and minimizing churn rates. Those are things Zaslav already sees happening with Discovery Plus. Of the two prized platforms, he adds: “We’re going to make them available in a way that is simplest for the consumer.”