Hello and welcome to BIA's Leading Local Insights Podcast, where we examine the trends, technologies, platforms and industry activities related to local media revenue. I'm Rick Ducey, BIA's Managing Director, and I'm here with TV REV's Alan Wolk. Alan is a veteran of the media. He's an analyst, a former agency executive and a co-founder and lead analyst TVREV, where he helps pretty much the entire industry dealing with media, media platforms, agencies, brands, ad tech companies all trying to navigate the rapidly shifting media landscape. Alan, you have a following over 300,000 industry professionals on LinkedIn and I am definitely one of those. One of the things I admire and most of your followers admire, I know is that you speak both plainly and always intelligently, in an informed way, about TV and the media business. You're definitely a leading light in this space. Alan, welcome to BIA's Leading Local Insights Podcast. It's quite wonderful to have you join us and, among other things, we'll see where our discussion goes.
Rick Ducey:But about a month or so ago maybe five weeks ago you released a report that really caught our attention and our community attention in local media, local TV perils and promise in the age of streaming. So I really want to focus on some of the things that are in that report, but also some of the responses you've been getting since your release report. I know there's been a lot of discussion and feedback. As I mentioned to you a couple of times now, I'm a big fan. I think it's a terrific report, really well done, great content, the work that you yourself did and the comments and the study that you included in your report it's just a wonderful resource. So I want to make sure people know how to get ahold of that. And then, of course, I have some discussion points we can go over. But first of all, tell us how to get that report, and then I'd love to hear just some of your quick snapshots of the comments you're beginning to get back from the report, and then we'll kind of dig into some of the meat of it.
Alan Wolk:Yeah, sure, thank you so much, Rick. First off, thank you so much for the very kind introduction. That very much is sort of the goal of TVREV's to sort of present all this stuff in a language that people can understand. So much of what's written about the industry is just sort of a barrel of jargon.
Alan Wolk:Cut through that and it's television. It's just not that complicated and we try and present it in a way that is anything but dumbed down but still is actually kind of easy to understand for people, right, I always go. It's funny. Years ago I had read a book about the Wall Street Journal which talks about how they really set out to try and explain business in a way that people can understand it, and we always sort of try and do the same thing with our business. So thank you for that. Anyone who wants to get the report to answer your second question, it is a free download at tvrev. com. That's TV REV. There should be a banner on the homepage to get you there. If you don't see it, it's in the report section. It should be pretty easy to find. All we ask in exchange is that you give us your name and email in return for downloading it. But it is free.
Rick Ducey:That sounds great. Thank you for that. All right, so one of our core areas that we focus on in our coverage area we look at 16 different media that connect advertisers and local audiences, and these days local TV groups have been in the news, particularly as they're trying to navigate news sports, linear TV, ATSC3, CTV. There are so many different ways to connect some of their core assets in both content and ability to connect with advertisers local, regional, even nationally. But there's all these distribution platforms, there's rights with sports and syndicated content, there are original news content. There's a lot of different things going on and one of the things you focus on in your report and in the study that you included there and some of the executives interview is looking at regional and hyper-local programming around news and sports.
Rick Ducey:And one of the quotes you call out, or one of you point out that local news is local TV's bread and butter, which I think many of the groups certainly agree with that. And, as you point out in the report, the good news for local broadcast stations is that, with the exception of the 65 plus demo a wonderful demo, I might say over half of every age demo is also watching local news on streaming. So the behavior in the audience is already there once they move the broadcasts of streaming. So we talk about the broadcast kind of over the air, which is actually not that much over the air, as you later point out in the report, maybe changing demographically a lot, but a lot of that audience gets picked up on streaming. So local news is something that broadcasters hold out proudly as a unique contribution to their communities, the industry and it's a great business model for them as well. So I mean, is local news? Is that something that local TV groups have a future with? Is that their superpower for bridging between linear and streaming, for modernization?
Alan Wolk:Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there's definitely a strong desire to have local news. We were surprised even at the younger demos. You have people 25 to 34 said that they, you know they sought out local news. It was of strong interest to them. You know, as has been widely publicized, other forms of local news are drying up. They've been bought out by conglomerates. Local newspapers and, you know, even in suburban towns have gone by the wayside. So there's a real paucity of local news that's out there and people really like it and want it, and so I think it is a big thing. One of the more interesting things that we heard from a number of people actually was that they they're looking at a number of them actually specifically cited what charter spectrum is doing with.
Alan Wolk:That has done it for many many years actually, with their 24 hour local news stations on cable, as a model of how you could expand out local news to be a 24 seven broadcast service.
Alan Wolk:And then on top of that, because it is on streaming, there's a lot of different options.
Alan Wolk:Now you'd mentioned sort of hyper local and regional, and that's the sort of thing to where, especially in cases where stations are owned by a station group or even if they kind of get together, they can say I'm just going to make this up, you know, here's California news for the entire state and here's a very local San Fernando Valley news segment for that and just being knowing, you know where you're geolocated based on your IP address or other factors very easy for them to kind of get that to you, depending, and so there is a real value in that and it is something. The big question, of course, that came up is you know how much? You know how much room is there for that? In other words, most markets have at least three stations and is there room for three local news broadcasts, you know, on streaming and all of these, or you know, or just one or two, you know, and the duration needs to be out. You know it hasn't been tried yet, so nobody knows, but it's definitely something to keep in mind.
Rick Ducey:Yes, that's a good point, we're recording this on Halloween Day, 2023. Happy Halloween. And last week NAB in New York had their session and they had some broadcast TV group executives talking about news and this ties a little bit into FCC ownership considerations. I mean, if you have several different news producing stations in the market, how economically efficient is it? How competitively effective can they be? To your point about news disappearing in some media, particularly newspapers, you know, in the general press there's coverage of. You know we're losing X number of newspapers a week, so it's a news desert and that news desert is growing. But one of the things that you point out Power, fine, this report, local TV groups and others are bringing more news, particularly video and over different platforms streaming, mobile, desktop, you know, over the air, over cable. So there's just some growth there. But yeah, I mean then you know, more news isn't always necessarily good. You want to have the quality news and you want to be able to geotarget it and have it be locally relevant. So that's very much kind of where the industry is now. How do we figure this out? You know, how do we make news that's engaging, that serves our audiences and communities well and our advertisers, by having, you know, premium content that attracts audiences, are trying to reach. So that's kind of where we are now.
Rick Ducey:Another area is sports and you give some treatment to that in the report and again we've got this great content in news and also in sports. And there are different distribution strategies. Each distribution strategy and each device actually has its own business model. So if you're going to an over the air TV set with rabbit ears, that's one business model. If you're connecting through an MVPD, that's a different model.
Rick Ducey:If you're connecting through Roku box, which is one of the most popular ones, or Apple TV or Fire Stick or whatever, that's a different business model. Each business model has its own economic, you know, supply chain and different participants and all of that. And even you see broadcasters with regional sports networks connecting through MVPD subscribers now, with court cutting, that that's becoming a little soft and even see some of the major MVPDs going directly over their own top. Essentially they're going direct to consumer with streaming services news, sports and other kinds of content. So with live sports and local TV there's been some movement to well, let's go back to live sports and TV and have the broadcast TV station do this and bring it through our own air, but also direct to consumer with streaming apps. How do you see that local live sports business emerging with all the different media plays and business models?
Alan Wolk:I mean it's it is, to your point, going to be super tricky and a lot of it is going to depend on which market it's in. I mean, this is actually something that the leagues discuss a lot. So let me, let me just do a lay this out on a macro level that you know, the sort of the feeling is you can look at it in one of two ways. Right, there's sort of the I'll call it the socialist model where, let me, let me even back up the screen A team like, if you look at major league baseball, right, a team like the New York Yankees is going to be okay because they can attract.
Alan Wolk:You know, they're a name brand, they're well known, they will attract people overseas, all around the United States. A team like the Cleveland Guardians probably doesn't have that kind of marketability, at least not right now. So there's one way to look at it and say, okay, the league does everything, as the league and the Yankees sort of subsidize the Guardians because, at the end of the day, it's better for everyone to have all the teams be financially successful. And then there's the other piece of that that says, no, we should. You know, every team is responsible for itself and some teams will be more successful than others.
Alan Wolk:And you know that's what happens with European soccer and that you know, like you know, and that hasn't fallen apart. So to deal with that, so that's sort of the sort of table stakes as you get into the actual specifics of it. It gets tricky too because, as you said, you know there's some over the air stuff, what's going on streaming, you know, and then also, how local do you get to? There are, you know, you have the national, the national, the national team, the major four sports and you know hockey, basketball, football, baseball. But then you also have a lot of your money, especially once you get into smaller markets. You have minor league teams, you have local colleges, you even have high school sports that you know, that are televised, and that was sort of a home market in and of itself, and I think what's good. If I had to guess, I think what's going to happen is that there's not going to be any sort of standard that will really play out on a market by market basis.
Rick Ducey:Interesting.
Alan Wolk:Depending on, you know, the team, their fan base, what kind of deals they can get, you know. And again, like you know, you know we have what are the 206 DMAs, and in most of them there is no major league sports teams. You're looking at, you know, at what I said before college teams, minor league teams, and that's a very different play. There's a real advantage to having them on streaming too, and that people can sort of watch them, you know, whenever and wherever. There's also nothing to prevent them from being on both over the air broadcast and on streaming, and the assumption is that a lot of the, if not all, the broadcast stations will also sort of simulcast on streaming. You know, on the fast services, maybe some of them may even pair up with the subscription services, but mostly on a free streaming service, because streaming is just going to be another delivery mechanism.
Alan Wolk:Also factoring into that is, you know, which we haven't seen yet is the impact of the infrastructure bill, right.
Alan Wolk:So our government passed this infrastructure bill and what that's going to do is make broadband available in a lot of places where it hasn't been before, in a lot of rural areas and smaller markets, and also allow lower income people to have access to broadband. And then the other thing that's happening in broadband is we're starting to see the growth of fixed mobile broadband to the home, or 5G, and so there was recently a study that came out that said, hey, the speeds on this are approaching, you know, cable broadband. They're over 200, you know, and it's getting close, and once that happens it's going to be real competition, because while there have been you know, nctc probably has about almost 900 members at this point most of them came into a business market or to you know specific locations, but it's not been somebody with the resources of a T-Mobile or AT&T going in and banging head to head with Charter. So that's going to be really interesting too, and it'll probably keep prices down and also expand the use of streaming.
Rick Ducey:Right, yeah, I guess, when the phone companies try to play in the content side, historically they haven't done that well, but bringing broadband to the home, fixed broadband, definitely as a core, a core Strength for them. But yeah, I mean, the MVPDs and the broadcasters Are I won't call them distribution agnostic, but they know they have to be with their audiences, are, as we've been saying for years, anytime, anywhere, any device kind of thing, it just is. There are different business models and you know the economics are emerging, you know. So we see the different ways happening.
Alan Wolk:Well, let's discuss that, because that is a huge thing that you know right now they make a ton of money from, you know, from retrans fees.
Rick Ducey:Oh yes.
Alan Wolk:And when you know there are no retrans fees in streaming. Now there's people you know, I in in doing the report. People had suggested, well, maybe they could start charging the various, you know whether it's fast services, some something equivalent to a retrans fee, and then, just as you know, more people are like, yeah, but that's not gonna happen because there's just there's too many of them and it's not that necessary for them to to have this.
Alan Wolk:You know there's no, there's no cable active 1992 either forcing them to pay. But that is some. You know. That is a consideration that a lot of the income you know that local broadcasters make is from retrans fees. And how do you recreate that? And streaming, and nobody really has a good answer for that.
Rick Ducey:Yeah, I mean I guess with the virtual MVP D's there is some economic transfer and in Congress there's some interest in allowing the affiliates negotiate directly With streamers rather than through the networks, and I guess some of Congress I'm in the Senate are trying to have the FCC look at that. I'm not sure what the statutory or administrative law basis is for that. We'll we'll see how that emerges. So we've talked sports In news, but then I think you also have some ideas of where generally programming might go and with the shift of syndication Content of streaming, that maybe the bigger station groups may start to create their own programs.
Alan Wolk:Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that we've been seeing is that a lot of the syndication Yo is moving to. A lot of the syndication is moving to streaming now. In other words, if I own the rights to series, it's you know, I make more money selling it to a Pluto or even a Netflix than I do from selling it to a bunch of local station groups, um, and that creates a real opportunity for the local station groups and this is something we actually heard in researching the report to start creating their own programming. I mean more than it's funny, more than one person, it's it to me.
Alan Wolk:You know Oprah Winfrey started in local and that there's a real heart like So people tend to focus on news and that certainly is the bread and butter, but there are a lot of local sports shows and local court shows. You know the sort of judge judy-ish kind of shows that really can take off. And especially when you look at groups like Sinclair it's or a Tegna that own, you know, dozens of stations, there's an economy of scale there right yeah, you know that they can put out.
Alan Wolk:And then they're also looking at it, thinking, okay, well, if this does well, this is popular, we can sell it. We can sell it to other station groups, we can sell it to other countries and you know, this could be a real resource. I think what really sort of set people off thinking about it was when there were rumors that you know that which you know turned out not to really be true that they were looking to sell, that Disney was looking to sell off ABC. Right, bob Iger had made some statements to that effect. Yeah, Byron Allen came in, who owns Allen Media Group, and says, hey, we'll do it.
Rick Ducey:Yeah, we'll take that.
Alan Wolk:We'll take that, we make programs and like it's a good deal for us. And everybody else said, yeah, you know he's right, like we could do this and maybe not by ABC, but like we can start making our own programming. And there's, you know, there's real value in that. You know the cost of production overall has come down now, especially on the types of, you know, things like talk shows and whatnot. And it's, you know, because of the digital transformation or production industry, it's actually cheaper as well. So there's, you know, there's a real heart for doing that. And then you know, and that again, it's monetizable through advertising. You can get sponsors for it. There's, you know, it's a really interesting sort of trend that's coming. I think it is going to become a big thing in local over the next couple of years.
Rick Ducey:It makes sense. Yep, I think we're starting to see it and I agree I think we'll start to see more of it. I guess there's a relatively new macro trend of growth at any cost in streaming and original content investments drives that. And now we see all the major players starting to say, oops, you know, let's go back and look at the margin and not the growth curve. And so they're starting to come back, cut back at some of those you know billions of dollars for original content production, so that may actually create sort of a strategic opening for TV groups to introduce some of this more homegrown, local content that's good, engaging, but maybe less expensive than you know $50 billion a year. That's something that majors are trying to do.
Rick Ducey:One of the things that really caught my eye in your report in the media market, you know, for local people, segmented from an advertising perspective in different ways, but typically there are different appeals and value propositions for advertisers that are local, local. They just, you know, have maybe one business location or maybe it's a franchise with several locations in the market. So local, local ad sales, which is often very direct, sold local, regional, and that's like tier two auto or franchises with 20, 30 locations, something like that, and then national. So local, local, local, regional and then I guess what you might call local, national, national spot and then national, national. So the TV groups have gotten bigger. One of their investment thesis has been the more stations we have, the more we get close to a national platform. Here we can compete for national national dollars, not just spot, national spot. You know, if you get to 70% distribution then there are some FCC rules as to what audience distribution you can kind of get to. But in various ways between streaming and UHF discounts you can get to a larger footprint.
Rick Ducey:But you know we say BIA has just come up with an updated forecast saying about $176 billion gets spent by advertisers targeting local audiences and then another X amount for targeting national audiences and so all 210 DMAs, network video, for example, cable networks, broadcast networks and targeting the national market. There's a lot of spend that at national national market if you will. But in your report I was attracted to one of the comments from Madhive's Spencer Potts who said we'll see local as a largely underserved market as the advertising monoculture fades, with different creatives serving different audiences and different DMAs. I mean the idea is that you have one creative spot that you play across a country with a national media buy, but each DMA has its own character and that creative is not sensitive and therefore not as engaging.
Rick Ducey:Perhaps the steady localization of national television spend is underway and set to benefit local broadcasting. So that I mean, what do you think about what Spencer Potts is saying there, that some of that national national money might be reallocated to targeting local audiences with dynamic content optimization? Have some data driven metrics for audience segmentation and activation across different media on a geo level? How much of that national national money will flow into what we're saying is $176 billion already? Do you think?
Alan Wolk:Yeah, no, I. So I think that Spencer Pots, who is the CEO of mad hive, is a hundred percent right on this. I think that one of the cool things about sort of the you know, the move to digital and to streaming is that it allows for Targeting, geo targeting in particular.
Alan Wolk:So one of the things you hear back from a lot of advertisers is you know, If I will use this example, if I want left-handed jugglers and I go to Facebook, they've got a hundred thousand of them.
Alan Wolk:If I go one left-handed jugglers and I go to one of the streaming services, they're like, yeah, neither of them are watching this week. There's one you, because I mean, and it's a job but there's one Facebook and there's dozens, if not hundreds, of these different broadcast options. But but but what is the one thing that they do have a lot of, if they can target, is geolocation. In other words, if I say I want everybody in the southeast, that's a huge number of people and they're able to do that, and they're even able to go into DMAs and to sub DMAs and to zip code and even sub zip code. And an easy example of this is weather right. So IBM's near the weather channel is able to sort of, you provide data. So if I am Ford, say, and I learned that it is raining in Charlotte, North Carolina, today, I can put out my ads about our great windshield wipers or a road handling conditions.
Alan Wolk:And it's still a Ford ad. I'm still running the same thing, but it's very localized, you know, because too often people think local means, like, you know, we put North Carolina license plate on or we show some local hero. No, it's as simple as going here's, here's the weather today, and we're gonna run ads that sort of emphasize that, and so there's a real market for these national Advertisers, you know, and dispensers. Other point, about those sort of dissolution of the monoculture that you know there are regional differences and I think those are becoming stronger and so different types of messaging work in different regions off of the same campaign. But you also have, you know, sort of the ability to use data for all this stuff, and that's pretty cool and that, I think, is maybe come a really big thing sort of.
Alan Wolk:As this rolls out, we are gonna start to see national advertisers using this ability to target, to geotarget, to sort of, you know, to spend more money locally and to sort of not say, okay, everybody in the country gets the same ad, because why would we do that? We have these, you know. We have a number of different ads. Let's let's be smart about who we serve, you know to who, because it used to be very difficult to do that, you know, and now it's a lot. Now it's become a lot easier.
Rick Ducey:So there, technology plays a role in all of what we're talking about. You know Much where we need to go too much into ATSC3, but on the broadcast front, that's one distribution platform that they're starting to roll out in New York, the biggest market that ATSC3 is now available. Next gen tv from the consumer flavor Streaming has its own technology Distribution reception. You have dongles, you have smart TVs for advertising. More and more of it is being done on programmatic platforms of different types and you know that all of that is, I guess, sort of infrastructure to the key value proposition of audiences want content they like and advertisers want to reach audience segments that are meaningful to them at a certain point in their purchase journeys. And that connection happens with data, audience measurement and audience engagement, intention kind of metrics. So NBCU started a big effort on behalf of Pretty much a national part of video what's what's a better idea? You know what's the better mousetrap look like, and they resolved that down after getting well over 100 different proposals.
Rick Ducey:Nex star is looking at this from a local level. How do we get a cross-platform currency Looking at audience measurements, performance metrics, attention metrics, things like that. So we had gotten back and forth about this. So this this will be probably a 20 second answer, so easy to answer. Uh, cross-platform measurements, you know, performance. Where are we with that? What do you think skin? What do you think needs to happen next?
Alan Wolk:Well, but I think the industry needs to sort of figure out what they're doing and just sort of get behind something.
Alan Wolk:Um, you know, there's been some interesting action now where group called open ap Form something the joint industry, commission or council Um, the jik is what it's, it's known, yeah, and the idea behind the jik is to sort of vet a number of the alternative currencies you know, in a, in a manner that that is less expensive and faster than what's happening with mrc, so that you know difference, different station groups and networks can start using them.
Alan Wolk:When we've seen that happen, we're seeing that happen in real time now, and I think that's where we're going to net out, where there will be Alternatives, alternatives to nielson, where people will look, you know, use things like acr, data from smart tvs and other types of data to sort of get a real sense of what you know, better sense of what people are watching. So it's off of, you know, 40 million households, not 40 000, and I think Everybody understands you know the necessity of that because the, you know, as we often say, the real enemy of all of these different Broadcasters is not each other, it's digital. So they need to kind of steal money back from google and facebook, not, you know, not from each other.
Rick Ducey:Right. Well, a couple more things I want to earn by you. Thank you for being so generous with your time and thoughts here. So the report focuses on local TV particularly, and in the title we have opportunities and perils. We've covered a fair amount of what's in the report. There's a lot more in there, but maybe if I could challenge you to come up with opportunities and perils, what are a couple of the major opportunities and a couple of the major perils, some of which maybe I've already talked about, but for local TV groups.
Alan Wolk:Yeah, I think the opportunity is to really connect with audiences at a hyper local level, In other words, just you know, and that extends down to advertisers. One of the big things that we're seeing now is this you know, these sort of self-serve platforms and things like that.
Alan Wolk:Loud small and medium businesses to advertise on television much simpler. In other words, a lot of them already have ads that they run on Instagram and YouTube that are video ads and allow them to sort of get on TV and if they're only in a couple of zip codes will, they can still run in those zip codes. I'm going to see that in political advertising as well, as people in sort of down ballot races or moving on to TV because of that ability to target. So I think that is a huge opportunity, you know, for all of the players and also to sort of expand their programming options as they move on to streaming, because they're able to sort of target and have things both on demand and live. So there's a real opportunity there.
Alan Wolk:I mean, the parallels with what we discussed is you know how do you make up for the money you're not getting from retransfes and you know, can you make that up with advertising and there are other ways to do it. And the other issue is you know, do we need all three? You know, do we need three stations in every market? Like, is there room for three local broadcasters? Right, you know, that's again it's sort of in that question mark. You know, there may well be, but it's. You know, it's obviously more difficult than if you just have one.
Rick Ducey:Exactly. Well, before we go to the other quick things, anything we should have talked about that we didn't, or think we did. A good coverage of the waterfront here.
Alan Wolk:Yeah, I mean, I think the only other quick thing is, you know, is which I touched on is political, that political aspect, oh yeah, Right, you know, on a local level it's going to become huge in 2024.
Alan Wolk:Yeah, of course, the ability to hyper target. You're going to see a lot more different types of campaign down ballot, like state legislature and mayoral races and things like that, come you know. Moving on to television, Certainly there's probably about eight states where it's really going to go crazy and I think that you know, I think that's really going to be one of the big stories and you obviously bring a lot of money to local broadcasting in 2024.
Rick Ducey:Yeah, I think we're calling it 11 billion or so for coming into local media. I'm in a big dose of that goes to TV, of course. Okay, thank you so much, alan. Tell us one more time how people can get a hold of you and get a hold of this report.
Alan Wolk:Sure they can find me and the report at tvrev. com. Any questions it's just info info@tv TV rev. com and you can download the report for free from the website, thanks to our sponsors. So all right.
Rick Ducey:Yeah, thank you so much. You're being with us today on. Bia is leading local insights podcast. You are one of the industry's leading lights and it's always delightful and educational to speak with you, so I appreciate that and to everyone, thank you for listening. We look forward to having you with us again very soon. Check us out at www. bia. com for our events, podcasts, webinars. We also have free reports and please look at our free daily industry newsletter, local media and tech daily. We get great reviews for that. Always welcome comments and hope you subscribe to be part of our community, Alan. Again, thank you so much. Bye everybody.