Randi Langford has some advice for campaigns down the stretch. Think about combining your linear and digital buying teams under one roof.
As a VP handling political for New York Interconnect, which sells inventory for the likes of Altice, Comcast, Spectrum, Dish, DirecTV and others in the New York DMA, Langford is in regular communication with buyers looking to place ads for congressionals, state races, and issue campaigns. This is one thing she’s noticed:
“It’s a funny conversation because … a lot of times I’m finding out that the streaming and the linear [orders are coming] from two different agencies,” Langford told C&E. “It’s unusual because you would think everybody would just want to be in the same place to reach all the eyeballs.”
She worries that “fragmentation,” as she calls it, leaves the clients with an incomplete picture of their ads’ effectiveness.
“In a place where it’s coming out of one agency, it’s so much easier for them to understand the value: we create our reach and frequency with the linear and then we stack on [streaming]. If you put 20 percent towards streaming, look how many more voters we’ve reached.”
She notes that the appeal of streaming is really reaching a younger demographic of voters because older Americans still tend to consume linear media. Still, given that impressions have become the standard currency of all media, she sees the need for buyers to adapt and centralize under one shop.
“Because if we’re going to be watching impressions, we should be watching overall impressions, not what percent ran on TV versus what percent ran on streaming,” said Langford, whose territory also covers parts of Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Jersey. “So obviously centralization would be a win for everybody.”
Now when it comes to linear, specifically in the New York market, live cable viewing is still king.
“We’re finding that more than 90 percent of cable viewing is live,” she said. “If it’s live, we’re either watching sports or news. So what we do, once we find that sports viewer on linear, we then extend our reach by doing the same exact programming on streaming. And we are able to do it within the program.
“As far [back] as the special [House] election for the Santos seat in February, we had streaming on the Super Bowl, so highly desirable programming, and we didn’t have to do it across the whole DMA, we just did it in our targeted [congressional] district. That’s what we’re continuing here.”
“Whatever we do on a linear, we want to extend either to the cord cutter or the cord stacker.”
