[Quite a headine.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/business/media/streaming-beats-cable-broadcast.html) ![[Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 2.51.27 PM.png]] **Firstly**: ![[Y30CwRHhDdeKtmqlPP.webp]] **The TLDR:**  - Youtube is the fastest growing streaming service.  - Fastest growing demo on YT, and amongst all of streaming, is viewers over 65. - “*The big events on broadcast are as big as they’ve ever been. But the lows are lower*.” - That is; live sports are king. All else is dethroned. - Cable is near collapse, held up by sports and some cheap-to-produce reality TV like a fading heavyweight in the late rounds. None of this is real news to close industry watchers, but a watershed moment still.  **A thought experiment:** Does anyone clock out of work and say to themselves “tonight, I’m going to watch digital streaming TV?”  Of course not. It’s Monday. Below Deck is new on Bravo. The Chiefs are on MNF. **A question**: is a :30 second spot delivered over a digitized broadcast network, then multi cast onto a mobile device, a TV ad... or a digital ad? Yet another for [[On Political Botslop#^5d1ae8|philosophers]] to settle. **A plea:** the political industry should catch up to the rest of the world and make platform delivery decisions with the viewer's experience in mind, not according to the technical mechanisms of the ad platform. ### 'Digital' and 'Targeting' and 'Broadcast' and 'Linear' and 'Points' **Let's kill the terms.**  [[The Digital Attention Economy|Digital should already be dead.]] [[Targeting isn't Cool|Targeting]] should be on a march to the gallows. At least as far as this: **Targeting** your audience is not synonymous with **narrowing** your audience. TRPs/GRPs are a relic of the past. Lowest unit rate is nice; but more gross ratings points vs. the other side on networks hemorrhaging viewers does not equal "we're winning!" Political campaigns still make these distinctions because agencies they hire often depend upon said distinctions to remain relevant and profitable (i.e. the ‘digital agency’). Or, because our strategic orientation of 1)Broadcast (and its complete competitive disclosures), then 2)Cable, then 3)Everything Else remains in place. Everything Else feels opaque and mysterious. In a strategic pinch, we go with what won last cycle. Social media platforms *might* still be worth a hard 'digital only' distinction in video based advertising. Users are there doing different things... like talking politics. Maybe Facebook is still more of an acquisition tool. Or Twitter/X is an elite communication tool. Neither are built for native video consumption. (Which is why Meta is turning Instagram into Tiktok, [which is where kids get all their news](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/17/more-americans-regularly-get-news-on-tiktok-especially-young-adults/)... *might*.) Everything Else? Up for grabs. No single platform has the audience (e.g., monthly active users) to actually move numbers that determine general awareness - name ID, favorability, etc. Not by themselves. Not to a general election audience of swing voters in particular. ![[Screenshot 2025-06-18 at 6.03.59 PM.png]] One day, we hope to work for a client with 100%, fixed-opinion Name ID and a functionally unlimited media budget. That is, one day we hope to do the media placement for an incumbent US President running for reelection. The number one need of *every other advertiser in politics & public affairs*, with few exceptions, is reach. Second is frequency. ([[Voters are Functionally Illiterate|"I know you! You're the guy running for Mayor of Indiana!"]]) Any non-geographic targeting mechanism detracts from both: reach by definition, frequency because each impression is more expensive on a narrower parameter. So - do we A/B/C test three pieces of [[On Political Botslop|botslop]] gun 'messaging' to left handed hunters by running the model through our custom CRM and isolating only these 10,000 rural households outside our core DMA with a double IP and cookie match through a magic black box of AI driven inventory bidding? Or do we put our well produced campaign intro spot on MyOutdoorTV's new streaming service, because that's where hunters watch stuff? **The fractured media environment is complicated, but not beyond informed common sense.** >**Geekery Sidenote:** while free and addressable platforms have seen growth, for big-audience sports events, addressable platforms are losing out to the sheer capitalization of the non-addressable big boys like Prime, Hulu and YouTube. We find that the cheaper streaming platforms which still place programmatically on "big screen" devices run down scale - the people for whom $49/mo. for YouTubeTV is too expensive will watch sports on free services that come with their device. [But, because of the increasing ability of streaming services to deliver reach for big brands](https://deadline.com/2025/06/amazon-ads-roku-set-landmark-pact-connected-tv-streaming-1236432615/), platforms are going to act more like walled gardens than old-school DSP's selling leftover inventory. **Our prediction:** once live sports move over to primarily addressable platforms, the dam will break for politics, gushing over linear channels entirely and forcing change. Until then, linear first will remain silly conventional wisdom; and teams who don't adapt will lose winnable races.  Meantime, anyone who tells you they can address an ad to an individual target on YouTube is either lying, or, more likely, doesn’t know what they’re selling. We've heard it. Beware. ### Smart advertisers plan from the user’s perspective. We had train station billboards demonstrably perform for a client this spring. Drive-time radio has all sorts of residual value in reach and frequency at tremendous bang for the buck. New isn't necessarily better! Go where the eyeballs are. Platform agnosticism is in the interest of the client. Speaking plainly and providing the service of untangling problems clients don't understand - that's what ad teams should be doing.  It’s just a lot more work.