National Media Research, Planning and Placement recently unveiled a chief revenue officer who spent much of his career on the sell side with the E.W. Scripps Company.
Michael O’Brien told C&E that that experience will help give the firm a leg up this cycle, when ad buying efficiencies will be hard to come by amid a record deluge of political spending.
“I come from a unique position on the sales side, [but] I was doing a lot more than sales,” he said. “I was negotiating with the networks, I was doing all the distribution agreements with … the satellite companies, the CTV platforms, and had a very broad view of where viewership is going.”
Taken together, his 30 years of experience are a “strategic and competitive advantage” for the firm. “Somebody with that broad experience coming from the other side can be a pretty powerful point inside the agency,” O’Brien said.
Approaching political ad buying with a different perspective, he sees opportunities for clients this cycle.
“I think the opportunity is understanding how the voter-slash-consumer, how they are evolving and where the consumption is happening and having the tools and the ability to tell that story. That’s the key piece. … There hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation on the political side as far as buying goes,” he said.
As a result, there can still be a disconnect between the price point of a campaign or group’s reservation and the actual bottom-line cost to get the ad up.
“There are ways to change the transaction rules. There are ways to be more strategic, be more efficient, be faster, and change the business,” O’Brien said. “There’s definitely an opportunity to move forward in leaps and bounds with the ad tech that’s available [in] both linear and digital.”
He continued: “That’s part of what this opportunity is. First one in, they’re going to make a big splash, but whatever plan they put together, how is the integrity of that plan going to stick to your point, whether the rates are going up or they’re getting moved around into programs or platforms that are less desirable. You’re going to have to play both ways. It’s just going to depend on the race.”
He pointed to Montana, where a competitive Senate race in 2024 will once again create an issue with frequency for ad buyers.
“There’s not a whole lot of channels to go to in a state like Montana [so] the cost is going to go up. And so once the first person goes in, everybody’s going to have to chase them because the last person’s in is going to be paying an ultra premium. But the last person in is probably also going to get the inventory they want — if they can afford it.
One of the problems in scenarios like that is whether the digital ad buying forecast is correct. “How accurate are the estimates, when you’re getting down to a targeted area, to a specific geo or specific zip codes?
[In some cases] those parameters get opened up to get the impressions they’re supposed to buy — and then you have the errors — like spots for a Connecticut candidate running in Salt Lake City on CTV.”
