Two Thanksgivings ago, Amazon Prime streamed its first Black Friday NFL game, part of its groundbreaking exclusive deal for Thursday Night Football broadcasts.
Pundits from the broadcast and streaming industries were watching to see whether Amazon’s servers could handle the load (no problem) or whether its production standards were up to snuff (mostly).
The thing that caught my eye?
The QR-codes embedded alongside some traditional 30-second commercials. They explicitly invited viewers to whip out their phones and get early access to pre-holiday deals.
On Amazon, of course. Without ever taking an eye off the game.
In a single moment, Amazon crystallized the changes happening in advertising. They clearly demonstrated how first-party data owned by the tech platforms trumps the decades of experience of those of us in ad-supported media industries.
Buy direct
If those QR codes don’t make your blood run cold – well, they should. They’re one more sign of the need for those of us in traditional media to get serious about understanding our audience members as individuals and build direct relationships with them.
“Amazon’s real advantage is the depth of their first-party data,” says Bill Day, former senior vice president of the media research firm Magid Associates. “Prime Video accounts are directly tied into your Prime shopping account – a seamless integration from video exposure all the way to point of sale activation for endemic categories.”
In other words: Amazon knows who its audience members are (including credit-card numbers), where they live, what they buy. And they can connect them to a one-click purchase system.
Viewers are buying
Up next, Day says: Moving beyond endemic categories to local advertisers.
Amazon even has a fancy product name – “Interactive Video Ads” – a combination of QR codes, remote-control cues and other triggers to allow viewers to research and buy advertisers’ products without leaving the stream.
Last Thanksgiving, Amazon sold out its Black Friday game inventory four months ahead of the games. Even the Super Bowl rarely sells out that early.
Jay Marine, Amazon’s global head of sports, pitched the IVAs thusly as this year’s upfronts telling the Hollywood Reporter, “What we’re able to do, which excites advertisers, is deliver that live event scale, combined with the digital insights, combined with the Amazon shopping capabilities.” He pointed out that “a customer can go from watching the game to seeing an interactive advertisement that they can one-click ‘buy,’ and it’s showing up at their door in a couple hours. … I think we’re really positioned to deliver something that they can’t find in the rest of the market.”
(He doesn’t think. He knows. Can your media outlet do that? Didn’t think so.)
Individual knowledge, and data, is power
It’s not just Amazon, either. Every member of the so-called FAANG club knows more about individual audience members than we do. Meta understands consumers’ content consumption on Facebook and Instagram. They also have deep insight into audience members’ other browsing through their tracking pixel.
Alphabet can build a dossier based on a users Google Chrome browser history and YouTube viewing. Then they can deploy that data through the chunks of the programmatic ad ecosystem that it owns.
Apple has data from iPhones, its podcast platform and, increasingly, Apple TV+. Netflix knows what, when and where you watch video.
Meanwhile, too many of us talk in broad demographic strokes: “We’re No. 1 with women 25-54!”
Know your audience now
Regardless of our industry of origin – newspaper, broadcast, digital native – media companies are severely handicapped compared to the tech platforms, who have decades of first-party data and the expertise to use it effectively.
So what do we do?
Start with a serious commitment to gathering more of your own first-party data – from digital log files, from active outreach like quizzes and newsletters, through value exchanges with our audiences.
We should think, too, about how we might revisit and refresh ideas the industry considered, and rejected, decades ago.
One of my favorites, from Ye Olden Days of the ‘90s: The legacy newspaper industry formed a consortium, the New Century Network, to build collective tools in the then-emerging technologies of the internet. One of those proposed answers was universal registration system (what today we would call a single-sign on attached to a data lake) that would aggregate identity and usage data across the major news sites of the day.
My mentor Owen Youngman – then a senior executive at Tribune Co., later a professor of digital media at Northwestern – loudly advocated for that system (and probably crafted most of the pitch). It was basically laughed out of the room by companies who believed their classified-ads monopoly was divinely granted and immortal. So, why worry about first-party data?
Oops.
Within a decade, Google effectively built out that model. Using tools like Gmail to get users into their ecosystem, then adding in data from search and Chrome to build a dominant position in the programmatic ecosystem.
De-FAANGing the internet
There are glimmers of hope, though: The European Union is aggressively confronting the FAANG companies’ data practices; even the U.S. Justice Department is showing some renewed vigor toward anti-trust enforcement.
However, we can’t afford to complacently hope the regulators will solve all problems. Though we can hope those actions open a small window of opportunity. And it’s time to figure out if your media organization is building the data and skills it needs to make the most it.
About the author
Tom Davidson is the Bellisario professor of practice in media innovation at Penn State University. He was a longtime reporter turned media executive and product developer at Tribune Co., PBS and Gannett.