The economic impact
Spending was challenged across the entire TV upfront this year. As one agency executive said, “Flat is up in the market.” Companies such as Disney and NBCUniversal reported performance flat with 2022’s negotiations, with the majority of major networks describing increases in volume of commitments with declines in overall pricing.
A second agency executive said diverse-owned media suffered comparably to all other media because of the economy and budgets generally being down. A third executive said the majority of their clients grew budgets for diverse-owned media, but rather than spending across a wide swath of partners were more particular about placing more dollars with select diverse-owned media partners for particular product rollouts.
“Some [diverse-owned media companies] wanted a lot higher [pricing] than really was feasible,” said a fourth agency executive. “The momentum is there for us … our clients are doing a great job in terms of diversifying spend,” but said that there’s a lack of inventory for national TV campaigns from diverse-owned media partners.
Inventory scale has long been a source of tension for advertisers looking to invest in the diverse-owned media space, claiming that the media companies don’t have enough content or that content isn’t amassing the audience necessary to fulfill the terms of large ad buys. The fourth executive also specified that much of the inventory available from diverse-owned media companies focused on local TV, podcasts and radio rather than national TV inventory.
“We’re not just going to pay for inventory that doesn’t run,” said the fourth executive. “It’s media dollars—it’s not like we’re buying shoes that we just decide not to wear.”
The first media executive cited the scale of diverse-owned inventory as the primary reason their agency didn’t set a percentage commitment for DE&I investment growth this year. While the executive said every client on their roster maintained or increased their spend with diverse-owned media, they knew of other agencies that had to go back on committed percentages because the media partner couldn’t spend all of their committed dollars.
“It’s very misleading if you put a percentage out there and you can’t clear it, because you would literally have a spot on every single commercial break every single hour and day of the year on these partners,” said the executive.
However, the inventory argument is often one that diverse-owned media companies push back on. Revry, for example, launched an LGBTQ+-targeted ad network earlier this year that uses the platform’s first-party data to place advertisers against its audience on additional platforms. At the time of launch, Revry’s ad network included 10 CTV partners and 5 LGBTQ+ programmers, which the company teased would grow.
“The inventory is endless—we’re across so many different platforms targeting our audience, so as far as LGBTQ+ inventory, we’ve got plenty,” said Revry’s Daniels. “That’s something that’s happening across the board with different segments as well … That’s something that we at Revry have solved for because we did hear that from brands.”
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Multiple buyers brought up the issue of measurement. Many diverse-owned media companies are not measured by companies such as Nielsen because of costly deals. The fourth buyer said advertisers should increase content creation partnerships with diverse-owned media companies to both up the amount of programming pulling audiences to watch as well as to generate more funds for securing measurement partnerships.
“That’s where I think the industry is struggling—there’s still a lot of non-measured [diverse-owned media] and we need to see the measurement,” said the fourth executive. The executive said in some cases the lack of measurement impacts media mix modeling software, which might reject diverse-owned media inventory because there is no data showing a marketer’s return on investment.
To be sure, not all diverse-owned media is un-measured. ReachTV, for example, has measurement partnerships with Nielsen and iSpot.tv.