The Daily: What does watching TV mean anymore, live is the new streaming, and the real reason Walmart bought Vizio

Audio by Ross Benes | Mar 21, 2024

On today's podcast episode, we discuss what TV even is anymore, how the redefining of TV is reshaping marketers' approach, and why not all data is created equal. "In Other News," we talk about why live TV is the new streaming and the real reason Walmart bought TV-maker Vizio. Tune in to the discussion with our analyst Ross Benes and Alison Gensheimer, head of Nielsen marketing.

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Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson:

This episode is made possible by Nielsen, behind every good decision is great data, because when you're prepared, there are no surprises. Empower your decision making with Nielsen's 2024 upfront new fronts guide, visit nielsen.com for more information.

Alison Gensheimer:

Marcus Johnson:

Hey gang, it's Thursday, March 21st, Alison, Ross, and listeners, welcome to the Behind the Numbers Daily: an EMARKETER Podcast made possible by Nielsen. I'm Marcus, today I'm joined by two folks, let's meet them. We start with a senior analyst covering everything digital advertising and media based in a region that city folk call upstate New York, but they'd be wrong, wouldn't they? It's Ross Benes.

Ross Benes:

Hey, Marcus. Yes, they would be wrong.

Marcus Johnson:

It's barely the Bronx, just above. We're also joined by the head of Nielsen Marketing, based, I don't know where, and she's going to tell us in a second. It's Alison Gensheimer.

Alison Gensheimer:

Hi everyone, I'm based just outside of San Francisco in Walnut Creek, so in the Bay Area.

Marcus Johnson:

Very nice, welcome to you. Today we're talking about the changing way we view TV, but we start of course with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better, so minute on the clock, let's do it. The first question, we already answered, but Alison, you are from where and based where?

Alison Gensheimer:

I'm originally from Colorado.

Marcus Johnson:

Very nice.

Alison Gensheimer:

Very nice, yes, and I am based in the Bay Area just outside of San Francisco.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay. Ross?

Ross Benes:

From Nebraska, live in the Hudson Valley.

Marcus Johnson:

And Ross, what do you do in a sentence?

Ross Benes:

I work for eMarketer, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson:

Perfect, same sentence as me. Alison?

Alison Gensheimer:

I lead an amazing team of marketers at Nielsen where every day we look to strive to deliver value to our customers and our prospects. And honestly, we're kids in a candy store because we work for the measurement company, so it's very, very cool.

Marcus Johnson:

Alison, what is your morning drink?

Alison Gensheimer:

Hessey.

Marcus Johnson:

How do you take it though?

Alison Gensheimer:

Black, not now.

Marcus Johnson:

No, that's tough. Ross?

Ross Benes:

Orange juice.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes, better. SunnyD?

Ross Benes:

I prefer the actual juice now-

Marcus Johnson:

Great stuff.

Ross Benes:

... But if I was going to go with the juice cocktail, I'd go orange Hi-C over SunnyD.

Marcus Johnson:

Fair. Ross, your favorite book of all time?

Ross Benes:

Flowers for Algernon.

Marcus Johnson:

Alison?

Alison Gensheimer:

You may not have heard of it, it's called The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, I bought that from my mom either Christmas ago or two, it's good?

Alison Gensheimer:

Very, very good.

Marcus Johnson:

Very nice. And Alison, if you had to move, if you were forced out of the Bay Area, where would you go?

Alison Gensheimer:

Probably to a remote mountain community, somewhere in Colorado or California.

Marcus Johnson:

Good choices. Ross?

Ross Benes:

Japan would be awesome.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, it would. Very nice but-

Ross Benes:

Colorado is beautiful though, within the United States-

Marcus Johnson:

... That's true.

Ross Benes:

... I think that's the most beautiful place in the country.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm. Very good. Well, there are our two guests, let's go to the today's facts before we start the real show. Today's fact is, what is the largest private collection of books in the world? Any guesses folks, how many books do you think one individual has accumulated?

Ross Benes:

2 million.

Marcus Johnson:

Good God, Ross.

Alison Gensheimer:

I was with you, I was going to say one to 2 million.

Marcus Johnson:

Well, you should because you'd be spot on. I would've said, I don't know, like seven possibly. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the largest private book collection is owned by John Q. Benham of Avoca, Indiana with 1.5 million books. There's so many, in fact, they're powered up in his two-storey house, six car garage and also under tarpaulin outside.

Alison Gensheimer:

My goodness.

Ross Benes:

So he doesn't have a private library for people, he just holds 2 million books?

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah. If you wanted to find something, you'd never find anything. Where the name of CS Lewis is the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, you wouldn't have a clue.

Ross Benes:

Maybe these guys own the Dewey decimal system there, I don't know.

Marcus Johnson:

It's true. Also, 1.5 million, who the hell checked?

Alison Gensheimer:

I was wondering that.

Marcus Johnson:

The Guinness World record person's like, how many do you have? And he's like, 1.5 million. He's like, are you sure? The guy's like, you want to check? He's like, no, 1.5 million it is, I'll tell them. Anyway, today's real topic, what even is TV anymore?

In the lead, we're talking about what TV is anymore, what it has become, but we'll start with what does watching TV mean anymore? I feel like it means a slightly different thing to a lot of people, but most folks would still be in the same vicinity I would imagine. Alison, what does it mean to you?

Alison Gensheimer:

I think you led into it, it depends on who you're talking to. And really, the audience, like our chief product officer says, "no one wakes up and goes, I'm going to watch some streaming today," it's just not how we think about it as consumers, we think about shows, we think about where we might watch it, but we don't think about it and, I'm going to go watch me some linear television, it's not just-

Marcus Johnson:

It's like shopping, right?

Alison Gensheimer:

... Yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

I'm going to go do some in-store shopping.

Alison Gensheimer:

Exactly. I'm going to go to a Sunday shopper experience, no. But I think in the industry, advertised agencies, publishers, we have to find categories board in order for us to understand where viewers are really bouncing back and forth and really speak about the dynamics. But my son honestly thinks YouTube is TV if I asked him what it was. So I think you get some people that argue, and maybe you guys do too, that the type of content or the type of device or the demand, is it programmed, is it live, really defines television. But I think it's what is consistent across all of that, is that how we've defined TV is changing and TV is truly converging. And if you think about the flexibility of viewing television, it's amazing how we can view television no matter how you define it today.

Marcus Johnson:

Ross, you put together to me just a fantastic explainer in terms of how to navigate, you say, the complex TV streaming landscape, and there are these different buckets and we do that so we can make sense of this world. But if someone said, what does watching TV mean anymore, what would you say?

Ross Benes:

Well, Allison makes a good point that in the advertising trade, it means something different than it does to ordinary consumers. We have all these terms when you're TV and OTT and so on because that affects how the advertising is bought and distributed. So TV can mean linear or it can mean streaming, it's just completely different. But to a consumer, no consumer is saying, I'm going to watch OTT or I'm going to fire up my linear TV and watch a cable network, no one says that.

To them, I think it's just they're watching video that's primarily shown on a big screen, and it doesn't have to even be on a big screen, they may watch it on their phone or their laptop. But video that's at least a minute-long, when you get into the really, really short stuff, I don't think that's quite TV yet, that's more social. If I'm watching a 32nd thing on Facebook on my phone, I don't think most people would count that as TV, but a five-minute video on YouTube on my phone, a lot of people would.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, it's interesting, the duration also comes into play. Regardless, American adults, we have watching six hours, 45 minutes of TV and video combined per day, it's going to our forecasting team, that TV and digital video time is via any device, including time with videos on social network. So six hours, 45 minutes, and that number is still growing somehow, we expect folks to add another-

Ross Benes:

That's concurrent too, so you can be counted twice. Like, well, I'll often watch something on TV, my wife's watching some show that I don't want to watch, so I'm watching YouTube on my phone, but I'm watching the phone and the TV, that could be two hours happening within one hour.

Marcus Johnson:

... Yes, exactly. So if you're watching on a smartphone, that would be one hour whilst watching TV, that's another hour.

Ross Benes:

It just makes the six and a half hours seem less apocalyptic.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, it's true. It is still growing though-

Ross Benes:

It's still a lot of time for sure.

Marcus Johnson:

... It's 5 minutes per day, it's going to grow, next year is getting very close to the seven-hour day mark, but you are right, it is concurrent. So Alison, how does this redefining of TV reshaped marketers approach to the entire campaign life cycle?

Alison Gensheimer:

It challenges it, it up ends what we traditionally have thought about, but it also creates so many cool new opportunities. When we started in traditional planning, you had this set it and forget it planning or maybe even annual planning. With all the new ways you consume TV, the non-program nature of it, the bigness of live moments, they're all creating these new opportunities for advertisers and for marketers to really take advantage of moments throughout the planning cycle, throughout the year, throughout the day in ways that we never thought about before.

The other really cool thing is just advanced audience planning. TV was an agent demo world, and now you can really start to really target TV, think about TV in more types of parameters around what the audience looks like than we ever have before. And that's all because we've got all these really cool new data sources that come into play when you really can bring TV. And someone like me who grew up in digital, I'm like, there's a freedom to this new television that's like, it's closer to what I know. I start to understand it better and it just changes how we think about planning, which I think is really cool and creates all these new ways to do stuff with such a broad market than we ever have.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, I really like your gauge because it brings everything in one place, and I use it all the time. And a lot of the time, you used to have streaming over here and what are those players doing and cable TV broadcast over here and what are those players doing and having it all in one place and seeing what share of Netflix is streaming, but what share of Netflix is of the whole TV world, it is incredibly helpful to have everything in one place. Ross, what do you make of how [inaudible 00:10:19] ?

Ross Benes:

I was going to say the gauge is also cited by so many of those companies. If you read Netflix or any of those companies, they seem to love it too, I think it's nice that it's also updated fairly often, I think monthly.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes.

Alison Gensheimer:

Updated monthly.

Ross Benes:

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

Incredibly helpful. So with how fast things are moving, Alison, can you actually plan for anything anymore?

Alison Gensheimer:

I've heard some say recently, and maybe you guys have an opinion on this, that planning is a dying art form, it's an art form of the past, and really we have to move into this always on approach. Which I think we're getting to, but that's hard for people who, we've all been planners, we were all taught to be planners, but marketers we're chasing the data now, it's in silos, it's held up in different places. I was talking to a friend of mine and he was like, "I don't know how to plan for this year, I've got to do five plans to even get to one plan, how am I even going to do that?" But if we do that, then we were just talking about how audiences are jumping over, I think Ross you were saying, "I'm watching a YouTube video, my wife is watching something on television." If we plan, our experience is going to show up in the same silos that we plan in.

We have to really start to think about, what does it mean to plan across everything? How do you create a plan that can flex and move? And how do you create a data ecosystem that allows you to give information so that you can make those decisions? As new channels come on board, as the dynamics of new TV ecosystems come on board, as new shows get released on Netflix and all of a sudden everyone's watching Suits, how do you even plan for that? If you do an annual plan, you can't do that, but it doesn't mean you don't plan at all, it just means you need different data sources and different ways of planning.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm.

Ross Benes:

Well, it's interesting, Netflix, they did that big data drop to show the number of hours viewed on all their shows. But if that happens bi-annually, you're talking about marketers planning, that could be too late because that show has already gotten all its viewership or 90% of its viewership that's going to get, if it's a brand new show, and they're wondering like, well, what's the viewership going to be like in May? I don't know how you do predictive when you have that lag. And the other streaming services don't even do what Netflix does, so I think you're flying a little more blind.

Alison Gensheimer:

Now, which makes the data that you have available to you to plan and measure really, really, really important.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm. So I was just thinking about, we talked about, Ross, you were saying every six months the gauge being updated every month, and it does seem as though getting as close to real-time data as possible is the goal here, so that you do have fresh numbers. So you are planning for the moment and not for something that may have changed in the last four or five months, you just don't have the fresh data to support which decision you're going to make. And so Alison, you've noted that not all data is created equal, so in your opinion, which data rises above the rest?

Alison Gensheimer:

I think it's got to be data you can trust. We have a lot of interesting conversations around the office around how personal a decision that a marketer makes really is. You're standing in front of your CMO, your CMO standing in front of your CEO, your agency is standing in front of their client recommending how to spend in some cases billions of dollars. You mentioned the speed of data, I worked with a great head of measurement once, he said, "I make really serious decisions, not on fast data. I'll make optimization or small decisions on data I get really quickly, but when I want to make a serious decision, I want to know the data science behind it, I want to know that it's grounded because my name is going on that when I say that."

And so I always think about that when you're like, what data do you make those decisions on? And you got to be able to trust it, and to trust it, it's got to be stable, it's got to be cross channel. We just talked about those viewing experiences, you can't just live in a silo, consumers don't live in a silo, media plans don't live in a silo, great campaigns don't live in a silo. I looked at even the Dunkin' Donuts campaign, I don't know of you guys, I've really loved that campaign, I lived in Boston for a long time, so that really...

But if you watch, that campaign was so much more than just the Super Bowl commercial, it was a whole series of behind the scenes content that they released in all kinds of places. How do you measure that? How do you plan for that if you only plan the Super Bowl by? So you really have to be able to look cross channel, which means you have to be platform and publisher agnostic, you can't try to piece all those data pieces together.

One thing that we at Nielsen really care about is that it's representative of the audience and that it's de-duplicated. Am I serving a hundred frequency to one in person or one frequency to a hundred people? What's happening? And of course, in this data, how we all got into some of these situations is that you have to check those regulatory and privacy safety boxes, those matter. We as marketers have learned, we've got to really make sure that our data is privacy safe, we're passing all the regulatory parts of that. And it's got to be independent, it's got to be in a way that the advertiser and the agency and the team can really say that, this is an unbiased view of what is happening.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm. Ross, what does good data mean to you?

Ross Benes:

It's something that I can chart and put in a report.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah. A lot of the things you were saying is what eMarketer kind of also strives for trust, vetting the data, high quality, not rushing through things, and I think that will always continue to matter.

Ross Benes:

It should make sense with reality too, sometimes you'll see some external ad spending estimates and you'll see the open market is way higher than every other research firm in the world predicts. And so you don't want to cite that, so there's some ways, almost like a meta analysis, to make sure that what you're getting is valid.

Marcus Johnson:

Like the eye test, they call it in sports, you can see all the analytics you want, but there's the eye test which can also tell you what's going on.

Alison Gensheimer:

I think Ross said something that's interesting though, we were just having a conversation about this, which makes it so timely, is that the data does have to be something you can understand. Good data is data I can put in a chart and understand and analyze, that's true, it can't be so complex and confusing that you can't do anything with it.

Ross Benes:

Yeah, financial derivatives aren't going to help marketers plan right now.

Alison Gensheimer:

No.

Ross Benes:

Or something like an econometrics journal, you try to not be too arcane.

Alison Gensheimer:

Exactly.

Marcus Johnson:

Well, that is all we have time for the leads, we'll leave the conversation about how watching TV is changing there for the moment and move to the fourth quarter of the show. Today in other news, live TV is the new streaming apparently, and Walmart announcing that it's buying TV maker Vizio.

Story one, live TV is the new streaming, suggests Angela Watercutter of WIRED, she writes that John Stewart is back in Super Bowl 2024, had 123 million US viewers. Live TV is making a comeback and it has streaming to thank, Ms. Cutter notes that. With streamers raising prices and adding commercials, maybe the urgency of watching something as it's happening has the juice to bring people back to broadcast. And in a quest to get more subscribers, one of their biggest plays has been to secure the rights to live sports. But Alison, what is your take on this piece?

Alison Gensheimer:

It's so cool. I hadn't realized live-streaming had gone anywhere until as I looked through the eyes of my son and we're watching the Super Bowl and he goes, I'm like, "this is happening right now," and he's like, "really?" It was surprising to him that it was a live show and I was like, he's not experiencing that many live TV moments. But I think what's so cool about these new live TV moments is, it really is the definition of convergent TV, it's showing up, you can watch it in so many different ways live.

And I thought that was what was really amazing about the Super Bowl and some of the other games that came out during that period of time, is that you could watch it in so many different places when it used to just be that one place at that one time. And so we talk about streaming really helping to boost viewership, it just created so many avenues to reach a broader audience, which I think is an advertiser's dream, those live moments really gather people in one place. And so that ability to really reach them across everyone and to watch John Stewart on The Daily Show again, come on, that's been awesome.

Marcus Johnson:

Ross, any thoughts here?

Ross Benes:

I have watched a few of the John Stewart episodes and they were better than I expected them to, a lot better than his Apple show was. So Alison mentioned Convergent TV, the long time linear had become more like streaming ever since the introduction of TV everywhere and VMVPDs. And now you have streaming becoming more like linear with so many of these SVOD services having live programming that comes from their affiliated broadcast like watching live NBC or CBS content on Peacock and Paramount Plus.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm. Story two. In February, Walmart announced that it was buying TV Maker Vizio for over $2 billion, and Aimee Picchi of CBS News explains why noting Vizio mainly known for its TVs, also operates the SmartCast operating system included in every Vizio TV with over 18 million active accounts. This helps Walmart reach more folks with ads and develop its own entertainment content, something it might link to its Walmart plus membership, suggests Neil Saunders, managing director of Global Data. But Alison, what was your take on this deal between Walmart and Vizio?

Alison Gensheimer:

There's so much in this trend, there's so much going on in what you just said. There's the retail media network trend that we're really enjoying where we are able to leverage first party data from retail media companies in order to target in a cookie-less environment that we're all growing to. And then there's the growth of CTV, there's the growth of this new channel and the Walmart Vizio acquisition is just a perfect part of two parts coming together in that trend and proving that first party data really is key.

We knew it was going to be, we kind of all predicted it was going to be a big part of the story, but it's really new on boarders, clean rooms, ID solutions, all of that took what we knew was really powerful and has made it a really big part of the future state of the media industry. So I'm excited to see what Walmart and Vizio are going to do together.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm. Ross?

Ross Benes:

The ACR data component seems more important to Walmart than the ad revenue alone that they'll generate from Vizio. So all that viewing that's happening on Vizio smart TVs is generating a lot of valuable data for marketers and retailers, and now Walmart has access to that data and they could probably leverage that across their portfolio.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm. And that is all we have time for today, thank you so, so much to my guests. Thank you, first, to Alison.

Alison Gensheimer:

Thanks guys, that was very good time, thank you.

Marcus Johnson:

Thank you to, Ross.

Ross Benes:

Thanks, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes, indeed. Thank you to Victoria who edits the show, James Stewart and Sophie, the rest of the podcast crew. Thanks to everyone for listening in, we hope to see you tomorrow for the Behind the Numbers Weekly Listen: an EMARKETER Video Podcast made possible by Nielsen.