Well-known industry analyst Alan Wolk is publishing his popular Week In Review columns first on FierceVideo every Friday. This means that FierceVideo readers are the first to get all Wolk's insights as they navigate the fast-moving television business.
1. Roku Launches On Shopify
Roku announced that it would be launching an app on Shopify, the popular Canadian ecommerce platform, that will provide small to medium sized businesses a way to plan, run and measure their own TV ad campaigns, selecting the precise audiences they want to target.
It’s unclear how popular this will prove, given that most small and medium businesses don’t actually have their own TV commercials,
OTOH, many of them may have some sort of Instagram or website video, which they could conceivably adapt for TV.
Why It Matters
One of the unheralded bonuses of the shift to addressable TV advertising is that it will allow thousands of new advertisers the opportunity to run TV commercials.
A combination of lower costs and the ability to reach precisely targeted audiences will help fuel this boom, making TV far more cost efficient, Add in the still prevalent view that a TV commercial makes a product seem more prestigious and “real” along with the actual benefits of sight, sound and motion on a big screen, and TV is not a tough sell.
So Roku’s foray is a very clever signal to the growing ranks of online-based DTC companies that TV is ready and waiting. The decision to partner with Shopify is very smart too, as the self-service aspect of the platform is very appealing to the sorts of DTC advertisers who like the feeling of control they get from being able to plan their Facebook and Instagram buys themselves right down to the smallest detail.
One potential road bump in this is that the cost of producing a TV commercial remains astronomically high. Artificially high too, I might add, as the costs tend to be more reflective of the inflated size of national brands’ TV ad budgets than of the actual cost of making a commercial.
The flip of course is that many smaller brands don’t see the need to create TV commercials with movie-like production quality and have been quite happy with the social video they’ve been able to create themselves using the wide array of movie-making software that’s now available. (If nothing else, it feels more authentic.)
We might also see Roku, Amazon and the smart TV OEMs launching their own production studios for smaller clients, much in the way that local TV stations will produce ads for local car dealers and supermarkets. It’s an obvious win for both parties and if the quality is better than homemade, it may quickly become the default option.
What You Need To Do About It
If you’re a small to medium sized business and you already have video advertising that could easily work as a TV commercial, you should check this out. If nothing else, it’s a way to familiarize yourself with the advantages of the medium.
If you’re one of Roku’s competitors, then it’s time to compete: launch your own Shopify app or something similar and get the word out. I know many of you have been doing this sort of SMB outreach for a while now, but time to step it up. Control is key here, as in many DTC brands like to be able to plan and manage the whole program themselves, so the more hands off you are able to be, the better.
Finally, if you’re Roku, take a bow. It doesn’t really matter how many brands take you up on this, you’ve created the strong impression that you’re the perfect partner for smaller brands looking to break into television and that will serve you well.
2. Streaming Rules The Emmys (Again)
Steaming shows have dominated the Emmys for the past several years, though many of the articles I’ve been reading seem to imply that this is a new development.
Maybe the launch of HBO Max allowed them to finally categorize all of HBO’s output as streaming?
It’s all a bit odd.
What’s not odd, however, is that so many streaming shows won. The industry has sent out a strong signal that all its high-quality shows are now on streaming and those shows are all very much aimed at the type of people who make up the Television Academy.
Why It Matters
The bifurcation of television programming in many ways mimics the bifurcation of American society.
The streaming shows that win awards are aimed at a younger, more educated, affluent, liberal blue state audience and the shows on network TV are aimed at the opposite of that.
So even though the ratings for the Emmys were up slightly this year, the people who mostly watch traditional TV had likely never heard of most of the shows that were nominated.
That led to a second spate of puzzling headlines about how CBS was airing a show that celebrated its own demise.
As if ViacomCBS didn’t own Paramount+, Showtime, BET+ and some new European streaming services.
So let me propose another way to think of the Emmys: a three-hour commercial for streaming TV.
All of the major network groups stand to eventually make as much money off of streaming as they do off of linear—if not more— and the more there’s a perception that all the “good stuff” is on streaming, the more people will flock to it, especially once the streaming services get around to offering more mainstream genres like reality and competition shows.
The real losers in the shift to streaming are the bulk of Emmys voters who are going from a world where a network TV series offered something close to full time employment to a world where every gig seems to last three or four months maximum.
So while it’s tempting to feel a little badly for Tracee Ellis Ross and Anthony Anderson in their roles as the sole representatives of network prime time TV, odds are high that their gig on “Black-ish” is far more lucrative than most of the streaming winners put together.
Especially now that there are seven seasons of “Black-ish” and thus some major syndication dollars.
Something few streaming shows will ever see.
What You Need To Do About It
If you’re a large network group, keep on pushing quality for now—Emmys and other awards are still great promos for your service as evidenced by the wave of new viewers “Hacks” and “Ted Lasso” seem to be amassing—while remembering to focus on more mainstream shows that will appeal to a broader audience.
If you’re writing about the Emmys, maybe focus on the conundrum of there being so many series out there that it’s all but impossible for Academy members to have watched most of them, let alone all of them, and how that affects which shows wins.
Just something to think about.