EXPLORING THE US VIDEO LANDSCAPE !
There are a lot of differences between the USA agency and the Belgium one. In terms of internal organization (so many internal meetings here and not a lot of face to face meetings with their clients, as they must take the plane to see them!), but also in terms of media maturity.
Your first thought would be, that because the USA is a huge country, they’d be advanced on every media → but that’s wrong!
The only media really concerned by this maturity is the TV, or I should say the video. Here the department’s name is Video Invest. The video department is in charge of linear TV, the OLV and also the OTT (on the top), which are becoming more and more powerful. Some examples of the OTT are: Netflix, Amazon (but these ones don’t interest us because they have no advertising space), Hulu, Roku & others!
Hulu is more like a Netflix platform with movies and tv channels on it. And Roku is more like an Apple TV, a box/a key that you connect to your TV to also access movies and tv channels.
They are big players in the video landscape because they propose a cheaper price with a mix between streaming platforms and traditional TV channels.
Linear TV used to represent 70% of the market but they are, year by year, becoming less powerful and now represent 60%.
Similarly to Belgium, a lot of OTT content is not ad-supported (like Netflix), which makes reaching consumers who only watch that kind of video, known as “cord cutters,” really challenging!
Also, a huge country means another way of buying media. Internally, they are split into two divisions: there is the national team and the local team. The national team is in charge of the biggest advertiser, who is present, and they distribute throughout the entire country. The local team is in charge of an advertiser who has specific POS in a specific region, which is split in DMA (design market area).
But how surprising is that? Even if the TV landscape is very competitive, it’s only managed by 7 sales houses.
And in any case, it’s impossible to be present on each of them, as we do in Belgium, due to cost efficiency.
Video landscape is very fragmented and competitive, which makes it very interesting!
The other main advanced technology they have is programmatic. Even if the techno isn’t completely set up, they already start to use the real time buying for linear tv and it’s very exciting. I won’t go into detail, as I’m not handling the subject so far, but I’m interested to know how they are doing and when it will come into Europe.
