By Levi Orcutt
Mistakes happen every day. Sometimes, they happen multiple times a day, or in such a grandiose, impossibly bad way that makes you scratch your head and think, “How did that even happen?” Those who make mistakes often make them spectacularly when it comes to advertising.
The ad industry has many moving parts. Things must be scheduled in advance, but they are subject to change. Campaigns and programming must be approved by boardrooms and department heads and go through a litany of red tape before they are launched. Yet, mistakes happen.
In this blog post, I will discuss my recent delve into media planning, including a deep dive into an infamous ad placement mistake, my conversation with an industry expert, and other informational ad-related tidbits. But first, let’s take a look at the video that got me scratching my head and wanting to understand more.
“Squeeze-back advertisements have been removed from the [Ukraine-Russia] coverage.”
This was the only statement made by a CNN spokesperson when Newsweek asked how this severe ad placement error could have happened. The incident garnered many reactions online and led to Applebee’s themselves issuing a statement that reads, “It should never have aired, and we are disappointed in the actions of the network.”
The “Chicken Fried Ukraine” situation really struck me as something that simply should not have happened. Throughout life, I’ve seen my fair share of misplaced or poorly placed ads. I speculate that the vast majority of these mishaps are more likely than not the result of inattentive control room operators, newspaper editors with a sick sense of humor, or bad word association by a computer program. However, these cringe-worthy mistakes led me down the rabbit hole of media planning, and everything that goes into it. What I had assumed to be a mundane, repetitive process turned out to be exciting and, honestly, quite fascinating.
So, come along with me as I not only reflect on and analyze my conversation with ABC Integrated Media Planner and WVU alum Jordan Stosic but also showcase that the “noncreative” roles in our industry can lead to equally satisfying career opportunities, experiences and fun!
Industry Insights from Jordan Stosic, Integrated Media Planner at OMG23 | ABC Entertainment
Below, I’ll recap in Q&A style, my conversation with this industry expert in an effort to shine a bit of light on the quandary of how an Applebee’s commercial appeared alongside coverage of an airstrike in Ukraine.
What methods do you use to identify programming that best engages your target audience, and which key performance indicators help you gauge this connection?
When it comes to entertainment programming, there are a lot of contextually relevant options to pick from. Whether you are working on a police drama or a sitcom, there are loads of options across other broadcast and streaming partners to choose from to add to a target. A part of figuring out which programming to surround also comes with audience duplication. A lot of entertainment is about getting people who have watched or would watch to watch, so shows that have high audience duplication will always get included. That kinda shows you that your audience is already there and there’s a potential to convert non-duplicated audiences to be viewers of your similar contextually relevant show.
How do you incorporate current events and cultural shifts into your ad placement decisions to maintain relevance and resonance with viewers?
Trying to surround current events/culture shifts, I think, are two really different things. Culture shifts and shifts in how people consume media or engage in daily life will impact planning in its entirety. Take streaming platforms, for example. Entertainment used to put over 50% of budgets on traditional commercials on networks, but now it’s almost an even split between linear and streaming, knowing both audiences are equally important. When identifying cultural events or national holidays, it has to be relevant and align with your audience but should not be the entire focus of your plan or strategy. One or two partners aligning within the space of the event you are surrounding is a must (i.e., utilizing a publisher like Men’s Health and Women’s Health to surround National Health Month for a title like Grey’s Anatomy!). If you can make contextually relevant connections between audiences of your product/show and the publisher/platform you are trying to run with, then making something creative that can play in a fun way to an event or holiday is easy!
What key strategies do you follow to position ads effectively, ensuring they complement rather than clash with surrounding content?
Strategies change depending on tactic and partner. Take social tactics, which are a heavy engagement-focused area, while video tactics focus on viewability to explain concepts, whereas audio can be used to increase reach and awareness. When making tactical decisions, looking at historical performances and benchmarks of units is super important. Partners will provide benchmarks that if you buy a video commercial, it will have a 99% viewability or video completion rate, showing that the unit/partner is effective at generating awareness. Or if you’re trying to get people to download an app or go to a website, you’ll want units/partners that perform really well at generating clicks and engagement.
What approaches do you take to create meaningful, long-term engagement between your audience and the programming, ensuring your ads reflect their values and interests?
When thinking of ways to break through more and generate engagement, that is where custom videos with publishers work, or any influencer videos you use may work. If you take a more hard working approach, it would then be just to keep utilizing the same partners so that a particular audience is familiar with your brand. Honestly, I would say we do not create ads to reflect values, but rather generate interest and feature the show, and promote the new season. Our ads are used mainly to let people know a show is back on, and then if the show itself is good, they will come back. ABC also has a whole history and legacy that is recognizable, so it’s not difficult to play into the Disney portfolio to maintain longevity.
Hodges, C. (n.d.). Jesus is watching you [Billboard photograph]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gotweight/1992802926
My conversation with Jordan was productive, yes, but how does this relate to media planning or misplaced ads? Fantastic question dear reader, I will now explain that.
Media planning varies wildly in its application based on the product you are advertising or marketing. Jordan mentioned specifically that as he works for ABC and Disney, many websites and other platforms that feature NSFW content are unsuitable for advertisers, especially those he’s personally worked with.
“Disney is insane with brand safety. When running ads we block thousands of explicit and MFA sites. A lot of partners can run contextual targeting which allows you to run ads solely on articles or in programming that is relevant to your programming.”
-Jordan Stosic
MFA, CNN, ABC123 What?
MFA stands for “Made For Advertising” and is often used to refer to sites that exist solely for advertising. Anyone who has done a Google search can provide a first-hand experience of clicking one of the top results and instantly having their device bombarded by pop-ups, trackers, banner ads, new windows opening or a multitude of other ad formats. These sites aggregate these ads and serve as a bastardization of the very industry in which they take part. MFA sites take part in what is called ad arbitrage or put simply, a website publisher paying less for traffic to their page than they are making from the ads displayed on said page. This is commonly found on lower-quality websites and actually has a lot of negative impacts both in the industry and outside of it.
Most recently, Forbes was accused of selling ad placements to advertisers without making them aware that the placement was on their profit-generating MFA site, not the website that houses their content. Essentially, MFA sites trick advertisers into wasting money that won’t drive results.
Contextual targeting is also a large part of modern media planning and the Scooby Doo villain behind most of the “unfortunate ad placements” found on subreddits and forums. According to this article, as well as my research and insights gained from my correspondence with Jordan, contextual targeting is essentially a machine learning process in which an algorithm or other sort of program scans for topics of similar word choice, perceived emotional content, and curated segments to achieve the desired placement. It can be further simplified by suspending your disbelief and imagining a robot searching through web pages and databases to find the ideal space for your ad to grow and thrive. As much as you wouldn’t try to grow a sunflower under your bed, you wouldn’t put an ASPCA commercial on Disney Channel.
Why is any of this relevant to my life or career? I would never put an ad featuring a song about fried chicken next to live coverage of a sovereign country’s invasion.
While that may be true dear reader, there’s a non-zero chance the culprit behind our CNN placement error thought something similar. The point is that mistakes happen, and they can and will happen to anyone and everyone. That’s not to say that YOU specifically will make such a catastrophic error, but it should remind you to double-check everything, look at your work with fresh eyes, seek out a second opinion, and remember the context in which you’re working.
An even more brief conclusion to advertising mishaps and their unlikely origins
All of this led me back to my original inquiry, “How did CNN let that happen?” Unfortunately for myself and anyone reading this, the exact cause remains unknown. Through my research, I found many mentions of outlets reaching out to CNN for comment and even more mentions of their response-“Squeeze-back advertisements have been removed from the [Ukraine-Russia] coverage.”
For better or worse, CNN has decided to practice the tried and true CCP technique of “Nothing happened on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square. Please quit asking about it.”
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