No this isn’t a blog post about your resume or your first impression on an interview, its about media impressions. The current state of media buying which is compounded by brand managers’ goal of getting the most out of their budget, Spitball is here to say… NOT ALL IMPRESSIONS ARE CREATED EQUAL!!
On a CPM basis, social video is much much cheaper than TV. So if I’m a new brand manager I can shift x number of dollars to digital and say I achieved x number of savings while maintaining the same impression level YoY. It looks great on a slide to the C-Suite but that’s making the assumption that all impressions are the same, which they are not.
Then as a media agency, once you get those cheaper partners on a plan they are impossible to take off because the CPM increase would blow past just inflation.
Outside of cost there are some benefits of better targeting and more analytics, but does that matter if they are only watching for a second?
Here comes the worst part, national TV buys are guaranteed on a CPM basis! For a national brand you are guaranteed hitting demo impressions during a flight and then you get make goods (adu’s) if it doesn’t deliver.
With all that said, there is a smart way to buy Digital Video. You can maximize FEP partners (Hulu, Roku, NBCU, CBS, etc) which are unskippable and add YouTube Reserve (different than TrueView) and programmatic for scale. Those platforms are unskippable and will get you an overall VCR close to 80% rather than 20%.
So the next time you are looking at your media plan, we recommend not simply looking at how many impressions you are getting, but understand the quality of the impression. As the old adage goes, quality vs quantity.
