Nasser: 

Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool. Today I’m joined by Mike Fogarty, head of client development, brand and agency partnerships at Tatari. For years, marketers were told that TV was dying. Apparently, TV didn’t get the memo. In fact, TV’s very much alive. It’s thriving, evolving, becoming more flexible, data-driven and measurable than ever. Of course, audiences are no longer just sitting on the couch watching one screen at a time.  

They’re moving across linear TV, streaming platforms, connected TV, digital video, and on demand environments, sometimes all before deciding what to watch. For marketers, that means the opportunity is no longer about choosing one channel over another. It’s about understanding how the full TV ecosystem works together. In this episode, we’re talking about the rise of convergent TV. What marketers got wrong about the “TV is dead” narrative and how brands can rethink TV as a measurable growth channel. Mike, welcome to Shift Happens. 

Mike: 

Thank you Nasser, I’m excited to be here. And as you said, the macro shifts are very rapid and things are getting a bit more complex. So looking forward to breaking it down with you today. 

Nasser: 

Complexity is our friend. First of all, I want to talk a little bit about this whole, you know, working in a space where people say that a thing is dying and your entire kind of category is dying, and then it isn’t. It’s alive, it’s thriving, it’s becoming more measurable. What do you think about what marketers got wrong about the whole TV’s dying narrative? 

Mike: 

Yeah, I think in a way this topic was a bit disingenuous. I think we’ve been saying that television is decaying or dying for the last ten years, but I think, as you alluded to, it’s been a thriving channel for the last 80 years from both a primary brand builder, but also now moving more into a fungible performance channel because of the way that it’s now consumed over IP. And I think much of the marketer misunderstanding was because of just the noise in the space. And I think there was somewhat of a self-serving rhetoric from streaming growth that, hey, we’re streaming, right? We have streaming IP, we have streaming content. 

So as things were shifting from more of a traditional broadcast cable mindset, it was self-serving for those partners to put that messaging into the ether. And so I think that that was a bit of a signal to noise ratio between marketers trying to understand where do I start in TV? Is it traditional? Is it streaming? What’s the right access point for me? And so this is just more a misnomer to me. It’s not TV is dying. It’s just simply it’s rapidly changing in terms of choice and consumption because of the way that it’s proliferated channel adoption, app adoption, the growth of internet consume television or streaming or connected TV verbiage, depending upon how you choose to define it. So that’s the best way I would answer it. I think it’s not so much that marketers really thought it was necessarily dying, but it was how to actually enter into this new normal as conversion TV. 

Nasser: 

It’s funny, when I was thinking about this earlier, you know, the typical narrative or the analogy that people would often make is of like the horror character who you would always think was dead, but they would come back and they’d keep coming back, you know, like a, like a Freddy Krueger or something. But actually, I think the more correct one is… as a child of the 90s, I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but do you remember the old Dolph Lundgren movie Universal Soldier, him and Van Damme, right. 

Mike: 

Jean Claude Van Damme? Yup. 

Nasser: 

That’s right. And they come back, you know, having quote unquote died, I think in Vietnam or something. And they get some super soldier serum and they come back stronger and better than ever. So I think it may actually…. leaving aside the homicidal side of things. I think there’s some kind of an analogy there. But you talked about the fragmentation and you talked about the shifts in particular around streaming that have driven some of this narrative. How have these changing viewing habits and broader cultural shifts change the way the brands need to think about TV planning today? 

Mike: 

Yeah. And so without a doubt, TV has become more democratized in the sense of how do I enter the pricing to enter, the more digital way to enter? It’s a new normal in today’s ecosystem, and so they can treat it more like digital or an AdWords experience or a social like experience, and platforms are making it easier for them to get on. And I know we’re going to break this down in a little bit, but what marketers really have to be mindful of is that because it is so fragmented in the landscape, because we have this emergence of FAST (free ad supported streaming TV), you have a lot of these apps that are offering AVOD or advertising video on demand tiers. 

So that’s a light ad load in exchange for content or the quid pro quo exchange in a way where we’re going to watch content. There’s exchange for advertising and monetization. It’s not just a single point of entry anymore because our distraction is so rapid. I think there’s a lot of stats out there from Roku and others around, the average household takes anywhere from 5 to 8 plus minutes to even decide what to consume, and so you’re fighting for that household and user viewing attention. Because we have so much availability now at our fingertips. It’s not just I have to watch traditional live television and be there in that broadcast or cable moment, but the ability to watch content in a rolodex on demand, in real time, or on your primary or secondary devices. 

It’s challenging for a marketer because you have to be in multiple places at once to capture that attention, and I think that’s really where, to me, a lot of that cultural shift is happening in the psyche of just deciding, am I going to watch the Knicks sweep the Cavs last night live on YouTube TV? Go Knicks by the way, I’m a New Yorker at heart, you know, or am I just in the mood to, you know, go on Netflix and watch Peaky Blinders that I want to go back to and watch the early seasons. That’s the challenge that marketers have to deal with for attention. 

Nasser: 

So I’m going to I’m going to play this section back to my wife to share with her that I’m not the one who’s weird in taking so long to decide what to watch, only to end up watching the basketball game. So now Tatari talks a lot about convergent TV. How would you define that in simple terms for marketers who may still think in separate buckets like linear or CTV streaming and digital video? 

Mike: 

Yeah, I love this question because I think we’ve done ourselves a little bit of a disservice as an industry where we want to pin them against each other, we want to make it linear versus streaming. And you as an agency at DAC, I get while there’s practicality around having to talk about it in that way for kind of planning and investment purposes. But in the end, it’s television. And I think that is the easiest way to think about what is Convergent TV in our mind, it’s not just a media label Nasser, it’s this continuous orchestration between how do I best reach a performant household or a user in real time? And that’s what Convergent TV is to us. 

It’s about fluidity on the glass, and that could be the 65 inch in your living room, or that could be your secondary primary of your mobile device, either on a vertical or landscape basis. So that’s how we think of Convergent TV, it’s television, its sights sound in motion, it’s singular. We don’t try to think of it as linear versus streaming. I think we have to get away from that a little bit. 

Nasser: 

So in order to get away from that, that requires education and some cultural shifts. From marketers perspective, you guys talk to a lot of marketers, a lot of agencies. Do you think that marketers are moving quickly enough towards convergent TVs, or do too many people still think about buying TV in the traditional way? 

Mike: 

So I do think that it depends on the size and scope of the brand. Of course, some that are larger who are still operating on the traditional upfront endeavor mindset, where you are getting locked into content and good pricing up front. That is still very much a thing today. We are going through the upfronts as we speak, and it’s still a thing and it’s still alive and well, but it’s changing rapidly. But where I think the marketers overcorrected, to answer this more specifically is they somewhat overcorrected to streaming. And let me explain what I mean by that. 

When we went through this rating and consumer shift from the traditional to the digital mindset, many of these brands were already buying on DSPs or demand side platforms today because they made it easy. You had a seat, you could buy in an omnichannel way, and for the DSPs you wanted to open up the connected ecosystem, all they had to do was simply add a device type to your campaign and add private marketplace deals or open exchange deals through supply sources to get onto TV. And for many marketers, they looked at that and said, oh, great. I’m already in my platform of record and now I can add this new growing and rapid channel. 

The challenge that we see, and if you take a look at the academic of the ecosystem, is that you’re only buying in a very small pocket when you’re only buying through streaming and only through a DSP. And much of that is because of what I alluded to with the upfronts, where a lot of TV, traditional or even streaming is still transacted on a direct basis. And so that conversation is happening between marketer and brand and the network themselves. And then in terms of the what I’ll call the Galton Board distribution from there, in terms of how things are distributing right through their subnetworks, their sub platforms that they’ve acquired. Tubi and Fox, for example, being kind of a part of that collective ecosystem. 

I think there was that overcorrection to streaming and programmatic only, and they aren’t being mindful of how much of that direct and traditional side of our ecosystem is not being addressed in the way that they’re planning and buying. And that, to me, is where the risk is in terms of their opportunistic growth, that they have to start thinking about that in that more fluid way. 

Nasser: 

So on the flip side of that, for brands that are used to buying TV in a more traditional way, what is the biggest adjustment they need to make when moving towards a more data driven or outcome-based approach? 

Mike: 

So two things I’ll say to answer this, which is one and I think it’s changing, but maybe not rapid enough, is… most performance brands recognize that budgets are now fluid and they can be more fungible. Day to day and week to week versus those month and quarterly and or six plus month book outs. And so again, there are particular reasons you might want to do that around a seasonal or a tent pole moment. If you know that you want to be in the Super Bowl, that’s obviously a growth moment for a brand to grow into, not an impulsive decision because of the cost. You do need to obviously book that out and get in front of that from a more traditional endeavor mindset. 

But given the way that TV has become so performant and digital like, I think you are seeing very positive changes in the way that they are planning and buying against that. But the second side of that is this evolution beyond the GRP of reach and frequency or the Nielsen rating points. I think we’ve definitely widely accepted at this point that TV is now in such a way that it can be measured on a very dynamic outcome mindset, and that could be things like incrementally, geo-match market testing to prove footfall into a brick and mortar location so you can feel proof of performance. And there’s also been a great evolution of third-party partners in the MMM or MTA space that helped validate different source of truth measurement. But that’s what excites me most Nasser, is we are very much moving beyond the traditional measurement, and that’s what’s making TV so alive and well and thriving.  

The earlier question you answered because clients and marketers can trust and feel it more, and there’s ways to design experiments that you can feel empowered in the conviction about TV. Whereas before you maybe were a little unsure on delayed reporting and understanding if and when I was going to feel the impact of TV. 

Nasser: 

I love this focus on the measurement, because the implication there is that TV as a channel allows for movement beyond the pure play awareness and very, very high-level metrics. Can you, can you talk about where it fits in that kind of journey-based approach? Does it fit everywhere or is it just an incremental movement compared to what it used to be? 

Mike: 

Yeah, I think it depends who you’re talking to. But the way that I think about it is that at some point, search and social are probably the right places for you to honestly start. And I would say that as a strategic consultant that if you are a VC funded, DTC mid-market or growth brand, right, there are logical places to start and that’s going to be one of them. To feel proof of performance, build your baseline, build your audience pool. But at a certain point, I think your funnel starts to get starved. 

And in order for you to actually fill that funnel, you need more of those canvasing or higher impact sites on emotion channels like TV. So you can actually feel that on both what we call at Tatari a more immediate basis, which could be more performant or causal spike versus more of the delayed drag factor, the halo effect of television, where it might benefit your search, your social, your organic, your email campaigns. And so, we look at TV at both brand and performance, I think there are alternative technologies out there that are very much calling it performance TV as a singular entity. 

And I understand kind of the verbiage there. You can measure it like a digital campaign, but I think in many ways we have to also recognize that connected TV is, again, television, right? It’s not just about the performance that it can drive on an immediate basis, whether that’s a site visit, an app download, a physical commerce transaction, Amazon cart lift or physical footfall into a brick-and-mortar location, which we know does occur and is more challenging to measure. 

But it’s so much more than that because it is both a transactional channel and that brand mail driver channel to grow that equity for, for partners. And so I think it’s the entire funnel in the way that we view it at Tatari. 

Nasser: 

Are you able to kind of illustrate that with a couple of examples of the kinds of impacts that you’ve been able to see and affect, for brands and for clients? 

Mike: 

Yeah, sure. Actually, I can talk about one that’s recently public with Saatva. Hopefully most are familiar with Saatva in the bed category. But Saatva is both a physical and a digital,  where you’re able to have both digital transactions where folks might feel comfortable buying a bed online without actually going to feel it in person. Obviously, certain people are different in terms of their shopping experiences and their research patterns, but we were able to do a lot of testing with them to show both the digital lift  in what television was providing, but also that footfall and kind of retail ecosystem where there was a lot of that geographic or kind of match market testing, where you obviously are having holdouts in certain markets where you’re injecting that site, sound, and motion into others. 

And I think that we’ve seen that consistently, not just with retail, but again, even from a Super Bowl mindset, we had four clients in the Super Bowl this year, to go back to that example. Partners like Manscaped, Life360, Rho and Tecovas. And so, you know, even in those types of brands, they felt it on an immediate spike because that’s one of the largest tune in moments of the year, where you have a lot of concurrent viewership on both the traditional and the digital mindset. 

But they were prepared to measure that not just by the immediate impact of which they were going to feel from that moment, but the delayed effect of what was going to happen because they had to have support on search and social and their SEO and everything getting ready for that growth moment. And so I think we are in a mindset that, you know, now that you can measure it an incremental way, which is understanding, did I actually drive net new conversions over those that would have otherwise converted or otherwise visited my store? 

I think we’re in this mature state of measurement now where we’re getting beyond just the vanity view through or again, going back to the reach and frequency metrics of GRPs. All of those metrics are health metrics, they are a path to an outcome. But because we can now actually get down to a very specific household penetration, to say that we drove this type of causal lift or incremental lift in outcomes both physically and digitally. Brands are feeling more confidence entering TV for the first time. 

Nasser: 

So on a very practical basis, and to round us out with this, whether a brand is already investing in TV or it’s just starting to consider it, what’s one thing that marketers should rethink about how they plan, buy, or measure TV today? 

Mike: 

Nasser to close this out, I’m going to go back to the orchestration of convergence. I think marketers have to recognize that television is alive and well. US adults, depending upon what stat you read, are still spending three plus hours per day consuming this content on both a traditional and a digital mindset. And so if you’re only buying through one side of the aisle, or only coming at it again from a programmatic only mindset, there’s a huge opportunistic way that they could be approaching TV with more integrated investment and holistic measurement. 

And so I want marketers to be mindful of these trends and understanding that we are in a rapid state of change as sports, digital distribution is rapidly changing. And that traditional in many ways, is still very an intentional way to buy into the market. So that would be my wisdom that I would lead any marketer that’s either new or existing to TV as they evolve. 

Nasser: 

So that’s the shift. TV didn’t die, it just changed the script. Audiences are moving across linear, streaming, connected TV, digital video, and on-demand environments. But for marketers, that shift isn’t a problem to solve. It’s an opportunity to plan smarter, optimize faster, and connect TV investments more directly to business outcomes. TV’s next act is already here. The brands that win will be the ones that see the whole screen, not just one channel at a time, and bring sharper questions, smarter measurement and digital level discipline to every part of the TV ecosystem. 

Mike, in the immortal words of Dolph Lundgren in the Universal Soldier, Are we having fun yet? 

Mike: 

Yes we are. 

Nasser: 

Yes we are. Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens. Leave us a review and share this episode with your team. If you have any questions for the podcast, please email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com, we’d love to hear from you. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. 

Mike: 

It was an absolute pleasure. Cheers. 

Nasser: 

And thank you for joining us on Shift Happens. I’m Nasser Sahlool.