In my column two weeks ago, I wrote that broadcast television must transform, not simply evolve, to remain relevant with advertisers and buyers, and that transformation will require collaboration across the industry. That column generated more comments, reposts, shares and likes than any I’ve written over the past 19 months.
Adam Armbruster
One of the most thoughtful responses came from Adam Armbruster, founder of Armbruster & Associates, an advertising advisory firm that works with large local and regional advertisers. Armbruster has long been a supporter of my thinking about the future of local television, but more importantly, he represents the people our industry ultimately serves: advertisers investing millions of dollars each year to grow their businesses.
We spoke the day the column was published, and I asked if he would answer a series of questions via email from the advertiser’s perspective. Rather than hearing another broadcaster’s opinion about what television should become, I thought it would be valuable to hear directly from someone who advises the businesses deciding where those advertising dollars go.
You comment often on my column, usually positive and supportive of my progressive thoughts for the TV industry. What’s your background, and what you do at Armbruster & Associates?
Previously in sales, I served Pulitzer Broadcasting [later Hearst], Capital Cities [later ABC/Disney] while learning from Jedi masters of television management. I’m a 40-year broadcast veteran fighting the good fight for linear TV in key advertising sectors with my firm, Armbruster and Associates. We lead a team of best-in-class executives that are industry advisors, recruited from all the key advertiser groups. We don’t place media; we advise our clients with best practices to get the absolute best outcomes. Their media teams place their own media, or it’s placed through their agency.
You are a huge proponent of the power of local broadcast TV. Is it the primary ad medium that you advise for your clients to implement in their ad strategies?
For our clients, TV is always the lead dog in the strategy, so yes. After hundreds of campaigns I’ve designed over many years, the clients that led with broadcast outperformed other previous lower-funnel media strategies [without broadcast] in sales, profits and market share. This result has only improved over time even as TV was reported to be declining. Also, I only use client empirical business data for campaign assessment, and never any other metrics. Nothing says client success like their stuffed cash register.
Approximately how many clients are you advising? What is the approximate amount of advertising dollars they invest annually? And what percent of that is local broadcast TV?
Currently, our firm consults over 50 clients with active campaigns with a combined annual spend over $35 million. Normally, broadcast is at least 25%-65% of the media spend. It varies based on budget size and objective.
What are your clients missing today when they are buying? What type of data and information are they looking for when they buy media?
Clients are missing hard audience data. I know many products on the market that can guide an advertiser toward intenders, but what’s missing is accurate audience data. When I share with business leaders how the mainstream audience measurement firms gather their intel, I usually get puzzled looks or even smirks. Many clients are not sold on audience data as accurate and some even see it as strange science at best. The whole thing seem seems risky to some of them. I am convinced that this is the single reason why broadcast still only gets 10% of the local ad dollar. I’ve learned that when a client feels confident in a delivery system and a positive result, they will funnel dollars to it immediately.
You commented on my last column that “advertisers are not moving fast enough.” The buy side sees this as well?
They are still struggling with some of the basic deep knowledge points about broadcast, and meanwhile TV is evolving once again. It’s a never-ending game of catch up. The reason you still see so much client spending in direct mail, billboards, print and other media is because they trust what they are buying. It’s that simple. So, if we can educate and guide clients, we win.
You’ve mentioned that there is skepticism from your clients about the currencies. What are their concerns?
First, they are told that TV viewing is a daily habit. True. They are also told that people tend to view five or so channels and stations habitually as well. Also true. Then, when the TV ratings are shared with advertisers, the audiences seemed to have fluctuated wildly between networks and months. The clients look at all of this and then usually ask me: “How can both of these things be true at the same time?” They are initially hesitant to place large percentages of their budgets in a moving target. They want to be able to better rely on delivery and overall consistency to deliver results.
It sounds like your clients have moved beyond GRPs and are all transacting on impressions whether broadcast or digital. Is this an important part of your strategy?
Let me give a real-world client example here. When a mattress chain owner sells mattresses over a promotional sales weekend, they don’t report: “I sold 1.6% of the available mattress sales in my market.” What they actually say is that “I sold 3,000 mattresses and made $300,000 gross profit because TV worked.” That’s a language of thousands, of course in TV we call it impressions. This is why I always present audience sizes in thousands, reach and frequency to our clients. Never, and I mean never, discuss ratings or GRP info. If I want them to instantly doze off, I can always read the back of an old ratings book.
Are broadcasters able to provide valuable data that proves advertising is working for your clients?
Yes and no. Attribution tools give a sense, but the endgame is the client zero party data. With client data there is no tech lag or tech static between reporting platforms and dashboards. Many times I see station attribution reports lag and then severely underreport the impact of a TV campaign. That cheats the station. Seems to me we are harming ourselves if we only use these tools with advertisers.
Conversely, the mashing of audience impressions, reach and frequency with client CRM data always shows the truth. In many cases we can see immediate and substantial increases in client traffic, sales, profits and, of course, website traffic as soon as the tv ads begin airing. If we had a more accurate TV and audience delivery system we may eventually see more coordination of these listed indicators. When broadcast sales teams use the methodology I detailed above, clients can then rest easy that TV delivers for them. This requires a reset in broadcast sales go-to-market training.
If broadcast television could combine its extraordinary reach and trusted local content with the targeting, measurement and attribution advertisers associate with digital media, how much more competitive would the medium become?
You’ll think I’m kidding when I say this, but I feel that broadcasters could 5X their current revenues. Why? Because local TV is still getting 10% of the local ad dollar currently. I find this very frustrating. Direct mail outearns TV by a factor of two to one. Why? Because clients know that they can accurately count how many direct mails get sent, how many came back, how many units they sold and how much they earned.
Imagine if they had that same confidence in the TV audience size, the audience viewing consistency, the narrow demographic bracket, the intender intel on that audience, the actionable response from those viewers and then of course all the downstream sales and profit data. This is a world that I want to live in.
By the way, we have many clients that quickly triple or quadruple their broadcast spend when we begin serving them and prove TV works. That’s what’s possible. I’ve reached out many times to TV leadership executives with this question: Why can’t we do this same thing I do with clients across the entire television industry?
Are there opportunities for broadcasters to use their local relationships differently? Could local stations become more like marketing partners to businesses rather than simply sellers of 30-second spots and impressions?
The only way to massive success with any client is exactly this idea. We must be seen as valuable business resources and not just another vendor. When you establish this level of trust you will be brought into their tent and their guard drops. My favorite saying is 1+1=11. Because when a powerful client sits down with a powerful broadcaster very large positive business outcomes are realized.
You work with business owners whose livelihoods depend on generating customers. What do they wish television executives better understood about how advertising decisions are actually made today?
I feel that advertisers would say that they are always on the lookout for the next big idea, they want help in various sectors of their business, and not simply ratings data PowerPoints. If you don’t know how to grow a company today, you’ll be frustrated trying to sell ads to a business owner. The personality TV seller is long gone. You better have business chops now.
If you were sitting in a room with the CEOs of America’s largest broadcast groups and could ask them to make three changes over the next three years to keep local television powerful and relevant to advertisers, what would those three changes be?
Educate — Spend the time and energy educating business leaders how to actually make money using TV, and not just present new station marketing tools. The sale is results, not process.
Simplify — Somehow our forefathers in broadcasting let outsiders highjack our medium and create a confusing Tower of Babel of acronyms and secret code words that make a simple medium seem impossible to understand much less trustworthy. Impressions selling solves for this.
Support — Stay in the game with clients. Have the GM attend client monthly assessment and planning meetings to eliminate client drift and churn. Have the AE bring the next business idea to keep station competitors at bay. This is exactly how my firm earns business referrals and grows client commitments to broadcast.
My last column asked whether television’s disruption is occurring faster than its transformation. From where you sit on the advertiser side of the business, do you believe it is?
I agree. The media interlopers would love to have TV’s large, live and loyal audience numbers. They don’t, so they attack broadcast and make up numbers while churning clients. Broadcasters are in a fight for sure, but it’s a downhill fight and TV has lots of smart people. We need to nationally organize and make moves right now.
Finally, are you optimistic about local broadcast television? What must the industry do now to make sure we are still talking about a vibrant, growing local television business 10 or 20 years from now?
Serve the client at all costs and with accurate audience measurement resources. If we truly care about client outcomes from spending in our medium we need to show it and share it. Why don’t I see promotional ads on TV stations touting client successes? Meanwhile, digital firms bash TV and then spend billions in TV ads. Can’t anyone see this? We need to also use our own medium like pros to tell our story. Finally, remember that it’s a ground game. You’ll win client by client.