Who Will Benefit From Streaming TV Advertising – and Who Won’t?

I was recently in Orlando for the jam-packed ANA Masters of Marketing event and thought it was so nice to have our conferences back and to be able to reconnect with so many colleagues, both old and new.

As you might expect, there was a lot of discussion about what was happening in the broader economy, how some of the big digital ad giants were faring, and about the continued, strong growth of streaming TV advertising.

Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced a third-quarter revenue of 4% year over year -- and, worse, a profit decline of 52%. Some Wall Street analysts have taken the company’s stock price targets down as much as 50%. Google’s YouTube ad revenue fell 2% year over year and the overall profit of Alphabet, its parent company, was down 24%, while its stock fell by almost 10%, which only looks good when considered relative to the 22.4% that Meta’s stock dropped.

But the industry wasn’t talking doom and gloom in Orlando. In fact, there was a lot more discussion about P&G’s latest earnings call, where its chief financial officer announced it was cutting back on untargeted linear TV ad spend and planned to replace it with targeted, reach-optimized campaigns on streaming TV.

Yep, a long-time industry bell cow wants to lead the industry into the streaming ad world.

There are going to be some certain winners in this world -- among them Amazon, Netflix, Roku and VIZIO. There will also be some companies for whom this might deliver mixed results, including TV companies like Disney, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery, all of which will both lose and gain some business.

And, clearly, there will be some losers. Google’s YouTube should be a winner given its significant and growing viewership on connected TVs, but its declines in ad revenue signal a broader vulnerability, probably to competition from TikTok.

Meta clearly has no play at this point in the streaming TV world.

Tweener TV companies are also probably going to be on the losing side, having neither the scale to build and optimize the distribution and pricing of their own streaming programming, nor the niche positioning of some of the smaller companies that might be able to rely on groups of passionate super-users.

There seems to be no question that streaming TV advertising is in for a multiyear growth surge, but not everybody in the TV, video or digital ad ecosystem is going to benefit from it. What do you think?

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An earlier version of this blog was originally published by MediaPost.