Vol. 2, Issue 5: "No ... I Already Did That"
Two time travel movies came out within 15 months of each other in the mid-1980s.
One of them was Back to the Future.
The other was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It’s called Peggy Sue Got Married* and the rough plot goes like this: Peggy Sue Bodell (ably played by Kathleen Turner), recently estranged from her cheating husband (played by a jarringly young Nic Cage), is attending her 25th high school reunion when, after again being crowned queen of the prom, she passes out and wakes up as a senior in high school. Thinking she’s either died or traveled through time and just shy of her 18th birthday, she’s freed to try to change her path and fix the mistakes she thinks she’s made .
*In my mind, it’s most famous for a time travel theory called “Richard’s Burrito”. IYKYK. It also includes a pretty good cover of the outstanding Jerry Butler song “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” sung by Cage
Calling it a time travel movie is something of a stretch. Since it’s been almost 40 years since it came out, I feel comfortable further “spoiling” that while the movie takes place in the past and the future, it’s not really a time travel movie. It’s more of a period piece, though we’re really stretching the definition of that term too.
The movie has a lot of names you’d recognize if you’re of a certain age (Joan Allen, Helen Hunt, Lisa Jane Persky, Daniel Stern, Jim Carrey (!) - I’m writing these people down as I remember them) - but the more interesting performances come from the guy who plays Richard Norvick (resident nerd who makes good) and Peggy Sue’s grandfather who looks like an old Wilford Brimley*
*If that’s even possible
I want to be clear, I’m not necessarily advocating that anyone who hasn’t seen this movie to go and watch it immediately. I’m not sure how it would hit to a first-time viewer. I watched it a couple of years ago and I enjoyed it, but probably more as a nostalgia play than anything - both for the time it came out when I was a spritely young lad and also for the time in which it takes place in the past (when I wasn’t even alive). It’s fits squarely into all that Boomer stuff about “weren’t the ‘50s and ‘60s a fabulous time to be alive? You wish you were alive then, you ungrateful whippersnappers!”* Maybe those times were the best time to be alive. I’ve got no idea, but I’m a little skeptical.
*Whippersnappers, of course, being the go-to insult of choice for the elderly. Also, I’ll concede that there’s something very sleek about the styling from that time - the cars and buses, the mid-century modern architecture and furniture, the clothing - that stuff catches my eye, even now
By now, as I assume you are most weeks, you’re saying “What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
Peggy Sue Got Married is at its core a movie about getting an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and, imho, about remembering why you made those mistakes and whether they were actually mistakes at all. It’s also to some extent about forgiveness. And in addition to already spilling more ink about the movie that anyone did even at the time of its release, I think I’ve also successfully overanalyzed it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about linear TV, the transition to digital and the still burgeoning Connected TV landscape and how the digital advertising industry (and programmatic advertising) has a rare opportunity to right some of the errors that it made as we shifted from a census-based medium into an addressable one.*
*It’s not the most elegant transition, but I really like that movie and this is my newsletter
For all of the “half of my advertising works, I don’t know which half”* stuff that comes with television, you know a few things pretty definitively - you know the ad fills the screen, you know that there generally aren’t content adjacency problems, you know that the network’s break schedule enforces category separation and pod placement rules. It’s a pretty brand safe environment. The problem is all the things you don’t know, which happen to be equally important - how relevant the ad is to the person watching, for instance. As a blunt instrument, the GRP is a fine proxy for how “seen” your ad is, but I wouldn’t want my heart surgery done with a butter knife. I’d prefer something with a touch more precision.
*The craziest part about this quote is that the guy who said it died in 1922
But digital solved all that stuff. Digital gave everyone the opportunity to not only understand exactly how many eyeballs saw their ad, but also how many interacted on it by clicking on it and the ad itself was addressable. Everyone got a different one based on something about them. Suddenly, we had a (relatively) easy way to draw a line from the ad that came on the screen to the purchase that was made on the computer. But the things we took for granted that worked on TV- all the things that make it brand safe - were suddenly called into question. Anyone can slap an ad on a website and sell it. And hey, it’s a free market. Go crazy.
This is well-documented history. I’m not going to rehash all of it. But suffice it to say that CTV represents a new frontier - the dynamic real-time nature of digital with the brand safe, lean back experience of TV. Sounds like we’ve solved everything and wrapped it up with a nice little bow. I’ll talk to you guys next week.
“Um, excuse me, just one more thing, sir, if I may …” - Lt. Columbo
Every so often, I have the opportunity to talk about this with people who have a large stake in the outcome of CTV advertising That might be the understatement of the year to date. I constantly have the opportunity to talk to people who have a stake in the outcome of CTV advertising. All of them express the same concern: that we’re going to repeat the mistakes of digital - particularly when it comes to programmatic.
Their number one fear is that the influx of inventory that’s considered CTV - in whatever form that may take: dating and gaming apps on your Roku, an AppleTV app that mimics a fireplace (right in your living room!) - and labeled as CTV creates confusion and lack of confidence for advertisers in what they’re getting, which ultimately results in extreme reluctance or outright distaste for transacting in biddable, programmatic CTV.
And look: there’s a reasonable argument to be made for these enterprising application engineers and creators. Those apps are on connected TV devices. They’re sold, downloaded and installed through CTV app stores. Why wouldn’t they be considered CTV?
The answer is very simple, almost Occam’s razor-ish: Because that’s not what people think of when they think of CTV, certainly not the people buying it. And that’s reasonable too. You don’t think of the C; you think of the TV. And when advertisers buy CTV, they expect TV-like experiences. They think they’re buying CBS Channel 2, not Roku Rondezvous*. And those app producers know that. It’s exactly why they’ve created apps for CTV and included commercial advertising space. It’s very deliberate.
*That’s the best rhyme I could muster. I’m very sorry for both of us
But the result is lack of confidence and transparency. And bad actors getting away with a lack of transparency in the content they’re providing results in all kinds of strategies to fake quality inventory. That’s how you get server farms churning out all manner of content and duping unsuspecting technologies looking to earnestly monetize on behalf of advertisers. That’s how you get scores of cottage industries set up to measure invalid traffic. That’s how you get viewability measurement vendors. That’s how you get conditioned not to trust measurement at all and fall back on “tried and true” (but largely non-informational) vanity metrics, like click through rate, which then has people create content *just* for the purpose of clicks (i.e. MFA). It’s a never ending cycle that results in a race to the bottom.
I talked about unified IDs a couple of weeks ago. And there’s still no really way measure this consistently The walled gardens want you to take their word for it on measurement. “Here’s the campaign results measured by metrics with methodologies we invented and measure ourselves! Trust us! Your campaign did great!” Awesome. All I can say is that if I took everyone’s word for it, I’d still be wearing ties with Disney characters on them because people told me they looked great.*
*This isn’t a joke. For a period of time longer than I’m comfortable with (this would be the time surrounding when Aladdin was in theaters), when I had to wear ties, I wore ties with Disney characters on them.
I don’t claim to have all the answers*, but what I do know is that if the industry doesn’t make moves to shore up confidence and transparency and create a sustainable market, we’re going to have a massive correction in the CTV advertising market. People are going to stop buying it in a marketplace construct altogether. That does no one any good.
*Frankly, I don’t claim to have all the questions
The end of the movie (and again stop here if you’re worried spoilers for a 37 year old movie) has Peggy Sue waking up in the hospital* and ultimately reconciling with Nic Cage after the experience she had in the past allowed her to see a side of him that she’d never seen in the first version of their time together. I was gonna try to tie this back to TV and digital coming together to form a better combination … I mean, I guess that’s it.
Ta-da!
*My memory is the movie says she was in a coma of some kind, but there’s no real sense of how long the coma was and I have no point of reference for how quickly Nic Cage’s facial hair grows, though my guess is that he hadn’t shaved for at least a few days
It’s Advertising Week, isn’t it? I’m sadly not there, but if you’re interested in meeting some folks from OpenX who are there, hit me up on LinkedIn or over email and I’ll do my best to route you to the relevant people. If you see or hear anything that you think would be of interest, pass it along!
That’s all for this week.
Until next time, friends