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  • October 2022 Media Impact Report

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    For over 21 years R2C Group has been at the forefront of DTC marketing. As we’ve helped our clients grow and evolve, we’ve grown and evolved, too. So, it was an easy decision to rebrand our company to better reflect who we are today. Introducing Rain the Growth Agency

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  • Midterm Election Update

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    By Nora Cortez, Director of Media Planning Ad spends and political action heats up ahead of the midterms—what does it mean for advertisers? In the 2018 midterm election cycle, total spend behind political and issue advertising hit $3.96 billion, according to Axios. Through August of 2022, still three months out from election day, there has already been $3.57 billion in detected spend behind political ads putting 2022 on pace to exceed 2018 as the largest midterm election year by ad spend. With the increased spend, a record percentage of ad spend has shifted to streaming, where data and targeting capabilities allow campaigns to take a more precise approach within rich awareness media. Almost half (44%) of digital political spend in 2022 to date has been on connected TV (CTV) advertising, or streaming video/OTT – compare this to the 2020 election when CTV was a blip in political ad spending and the growth is apparent. Projections have CTV political ads spend estimated at $1.5 billion for the 2022 midterm cycle, which would surpass the $1.3 billion that’s expected to be spent on Google and Facebook. Despite that shift to CTV, a vast majority of political ad spend remains on traditional TV— specifically local broadcast. In the 2018 midterm cycle, 99.8% of detected TV political ad spend was local. Local is expected to continue to dominate TV political ad spends for the 2022 cycle, fueled by a slew of competitive house races. Political ad spend is expected to be particularly high in battle ground states – an influx of political and issue ad spending will likely create tight marketplace conditions locally and any brands with local TV investments may face clearance challenges and should expect tiered rates pre-/post-election. Although political TV ad spending remains largely focused within local, national news coverage of the races creates some challenges (and potential viewership upside) for advertisers. National coverage of the midterm election will be primarily condensed to the weeks leading up to, and immediately following, election week. During a typical election year, news viewership surges during election week itself and that increased consumption is incremental to normal viewing; within non-news cable, viewership typically remains stable week to week with no decline during election week. As a result, advertisers may see increased competition as brands try to capitalize on higher viewership levels and higher pre-emptions for election coverage— securing a portion of news investment in advance as fixed will help avoid higher rates and pre-emption. Regardless of openness to political ads, most major social platforms are proactively implementing tools and strategies for combating misinformation during the midterm cycle. While broadcasting companies are required to accept political and issue ads, streaming and internet platforms are not—notably, both TikTok and Twitter ban political ads, but the influx of spend has made some digital platforms rethink their stance. After pausing political ads in 2020, Spotify announced they would resume accepting political ads for candidates, political parties, PACs, and elected officials this year. Similarly, in late July, Disney announced they would allow political issue ads alongside candidate ads on Hulu as long as they align with Disney’s regular ad standards—the change aligned Hulu’s policies with Disney’s policy for their cable networks like ESPN and FX. // Facebook  Parent company Meta does accept political ads, but recently announced they were introducing strict guidelines for the 2022 midterm election cycle in an effort to better mitigate the spread of misinformation. Broadly, any posts rated false or partly false by select fact-checking partners will receive a warning label that forces users to click past a banner denoting “false information” before accessing the content. More specifically, Meta’s new guidelines are largely focused around disallowing and removing ads that contain false information about dates, locations, times, and methods of voting; this adds to their previous restrictions around ads that include misinformation about who can vote, what votes will be counted, and voting qualifications. // TikTokDespite TikTok’s ban on political advertising, which includes sponsored content from influencers, the company resurfaced their fact checking program from 2020, in part because political advertising within paid influencer content and user-created videos can be harder to detect. The program prevents certain videos from being recommended to users until verified by outside fact checkers. In an effort to proactively counteract misinformation on the platform, TikTok has launched their election information center six weeks earlier than they did in 2020. // TwitterLike TikTok, Twitter does not allow political advertising, but faces some of the same challenges with moderating content on the platform. Their Civic Integrity Policy has been reactivated and includes warning labels that are added to tweets containing false information about elections, election integrity, or voting. Any tweets that are tagged with warning labels are then not pushed out by the algorithm and Twitter reserves the right to remove false or misleading content. // YouTubeTo date, YouTube is one of the few online platforms that has not announced a midterm election policy or misinformation plan. While midterm political spend remains heavily rooted in local broadcast TV, as more political spend shifts to digital, advertisers will have to consider and account for potential impacts to marketplace conditions, brand safety, and performance.

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  • September 2022 Media Impact Report

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    For over 21 years R2C Group has been at the forefront of DTC marketing. As we’ve helped our clients grow and evolve, we’ve grown and evolved, too. So, it was an easy decision to rebrand our company to better reflect who we are today. Introducing Rain the Growth Agency

    Know More

  • July 2022 Media Impact Report

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    For over 21 years R2C Group has been at the forefront of DTC marketing. As we’ve helped our clients grow and evolve, we’ve grown and evolved, too. So, it was an easy decision to rebrand our company to better reflect who we are today. Introducing Rain the Growth Agency

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  • Five OTT Advertising Forecasts

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    The content below features an excerpt from the OTT Guide, Your Market on Demand. To view the full article, download the guide for free here. The OTT advertising benefits today are very real for both brand and performance campaigns. Organizations that also wish to innovate within this fast-moving landscape will discover new ways to reach their audiences with experiences that don’t resemble anything from the past. Let’s take a look at several trends that are reshaping OTT advertising in 2022 and beyond. 1. Young Families will Dominate the Streaming Only Segment by Mid-2023 We delineated three groups— Streaming Only, Mixed Platform (streams and watches traditional linear TV), and Linear Only. We noted that the Streaming Only group was dominated by younger single people but that there was a strong segment of Young Families still present. There are clearly families turning exclusively to streaming OTT entertainment with children helping drive that adoption. Young families are a group coveted by many brands and it will continue to grow, especially as Millennials move into and through this life stage. As the Young Families group grows within the Streaming Only segment, it will drive the overall average age of this group up. By mid-2023, families will overtake younger singles, creating a somewhat more balanced group. Targeting this Streaming Only group will become more attractive to more brands as they consume more and live in larger households. 2. OTT Video Growth will Further Divide the Linear TV Marketplace OTT video growth will certainly continue to pull more viewers away from linear television. This will cause the Streaming Only group to grow and the Mixed Platform group to shift more viewing toward OTT video entertainment. However, linear TV’s greatest strength—large reach events—will only increase in value. Within the OTT video landscape, there are very few events or programs that garner anywhere near the total simultaneous audience that occurs with traditional linear television. As recently as 2018, linear television achieved 1.9 billion viewers for the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. That’s a global number, but note the word “billion.” The Super Bowl also continues to achieve about 100 million viewers each year, which is very large. Big live events are important to brands because they offer large unduplicated reach. As a result, even if linear viewership of big events drops, viewership will still be high relative to pure-play OTT offerings and pricing will remain strong or even increase as scarcity of these events increases. This also means that more mid-tier and lower-tier programming on cable and broadcast will see continued declines in both viewership and advertising pricing as core groups like families migrate to streaming. Higher reach linear TV inventory will maintain or even grow in value. OTT video will grow at the expense of linear TV. Lower reach linear TV inventory will decline in value. 3. Traditional TV Networks are Catching Up —Can They Replace Lost Linear Viewers? Old habits die hard everywhere you look in the media landscape. Traditional TV networks are certainly making a run at expanding their offerings in digital streaming services, but can they dominate the living room TV like they have in the past? Some are having decent success. HBO Max now has 80 million subscribers. NBC’s Peacock app now has 54 million subscribers. Paramount+ has 42 million subscribers. This is still a far cry from Netflix with 209 million global subscribers, but the numbers among the traditional players are increasing fairly quickly. Will it be enough to replace lost linear TV viewership? These networks have two powerful capabilities that no other ad-supported OTT providers have—legacy viewership and large events. 4. YouTube and Amazon Will Innovate and Transform Content Most of OTT’s growth has occurred in just the last five to ten years, so it’s inconceivable that OTT entertainment will stop evolving. Innovation will continue at a relatively quick pace. The two providers with strong platforms demonstrating innovation are YouTube and Amazon. YouTube is a huge platform for prominent and long tail “creators”—people who are providing entertainment on their own terms with their own channels. Creators will continue to explore the boundaries and possibilities of on-demand video entertainment. Amazon is clearly a key player in non-ad-supported OTT video with Prime Video. They also own Twitch, the largest live-streaming platform. Twitch is mostly focused on gaming and is dominated by young male viewers, but it delivers a compelling platform for live-streaming content. 5. Live-Streaming OTT Events Will Accelerate for Reaching Most Valuable Audiences What’s old is now new again in the form of live TV—with live-streaming OTT. While OTT’s source of growth has been fueled by on-demand programming, there is still plenty of opportunity with live events. It shouldn’t be expected that any live-streamed event will consistently achieve the kind of viewership of the Super Bowl—unless it’s the Super Bowl itself—but OTT events will take on a more strategic role. The focus of live-streamed OTT events will not be on large unduplicated reach, but rather, on building audiences of strategic interest to brands. Celebrity talent will be used to attract the right audience and to promote these events. Today there is a lot of experimentation with livestreamed events so this area will evolve quickly and become a core pillar of any OTT strategy. On YouTube, 60 of the top 100 live streams happened in just the last two years. One exciting opportunity emerging for brands is the ability to proactively design live-streamed events to attract the right audience and align with a brand’s specific business objectives. Read the rest of this article and download the full Your Market on Demand guide here.

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