Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Stream Wars, our thought leader series where we learn from industry experts about the latest trends and challenges from across the convergent TV space. 0:16 Hosted by Michael Beach. Today, I'm joined by Gordon Borrell. Gordon is the CEO at Borrell and Associates. 0:23 If you work in local marketing or advertising, then you're familiar with the outstanding research that the team at Borrell puts out. 0:29 I recently spoke about the local video advertising market at their conference in Miami, and had a few key takeaways. First, huge props to whoever selected Miami as the conference location early March. 0:38 And second, uh, yeah, the local video advertising space is experiencing tremendous growth and disruption. We dive into all of that and more. Please enjoy my conversation with Gordon Borrell. 0:48 All right, Gordon, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Excellent. Well, we'll start you off with a softball here. 0:54 Um, you know, kind of wanna get more into the company and, and everything in a little bit, but kind of why don't you give us a quick bio and kind of how, how you ended up where you are today. Sure. 1:02 I've been in the media business for, gosh, 40, 45 years. 1:06 Longer than that if you count the time I was a newspaper carrier, carry, uh, delivering the Bulletin, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Inquirer back in the '60s. 1:15 But I started as a reporter and editor, uh, got into the, uh, management side of media, radio, TV, newspapers, magazines in the '90s, and then jumped over to the internet side into new media, uh, in the early '90s actually, when it was more about bulletin boards, AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, and then the internet. 1:35 Then started the Borrell Associates in 2001, and what we do is we track local advertising, the lifeblood of media. Excellent. And kind of what's the core problem that you're solving at, at Borrell? 1:49 Uh, it, it's interesting, Michael, because it's a problem that a lot of people don't know exactly that they have, uh, and it's because of disruption. Anytime a disruption occurs, it creates a new marketplace. 2:04 And what the propensity of i- incumbent businesses, in this case it would be media companies and ad agencies, the, they're, they tend to deny that the new marketplace is occurring. 2:16 They say, "Oh, people are lying about those numbers." 2:18 So the problem that we're solving is that we're identifying and researching and say, and sizing the advertising numbers, the total revenue, money being spent on internet advertising in local markets. 2:32 It's easy at the national level to do, but at the local level, down into even, even a county level, it's very difficult. 2:40 So the problem that we're solving, I guess, would be that businesses or media companies whose lifeblood is advertising don't really know or realize or even see, because of all the targeting, the level of advertising, the level of money that's being spent on advertising, particularly digital. 2:58 We gauge that and we help them see where it is. Kind of, you know, who's the core customer and kind of the overall business model? 3:06 The core customer is any business that derives its, its revenues from advertising and marketing. 3:14 So typically they would be outdoor companies, ad agencies, television stations, a lot of, lot of TV companies, uh, newspapers, even Yellow Pages, sometimes vendors in the industry, people who have ad-serving products and things like that. 3:31 We have lots and lots of insights on trends in advertising. We run the largest survey, a part of what we do, the largest survey of local advertisers in the nation. 3:42 So that's really the, the, the core business of what we have and the core customer, uh, for, for what we, uh, what we sell. 3:51 Mainly what we do, where we make most of our money, people know us for our insights, but our insights are actually a byproduct of all the research that we have to do to gather that data. 4:01 So we make our money off of licensing that data and, and watching the trends. Excellent. Yeah, I've always been, you know, really impressed with the granularity of your data, especially, uh... You know, I'd say that 4:15 it holds up to anything I see even at the national level. And to your point, having to break that up into, at a minimum 210 pieces, but you go even deeper than that is, has always been really impressive. 4:24 Over, over 3,000 counties, uh, independent cities and provinces in the US, and that's what we, uh, look at. We look at it down at that... Or parishes, I mean, down at that individual level. 4:36 And, and Michael, it's like, you know, peop- peop- we describe it best as a forest. If I showed you a picture of a forest, an aerial picture of one square m- square mile forest and said, "How many trees are there?" 4:48 You'd probably say, if it was fairly populated by big trees, you'd probably say about 50, and you'd be about right. But a forester would say, "No, you know, there's probably about 500." 4:59 So down at the ground level, if you looked at the picture, you'd go, "Oh, holy crap," you know, "They're the big trees that we counted, but look at all these other trees." 5:07 So they're fairly decent size, but they're just covered up by the count- the, the, the canopy of the big trees. 5:13 So if you're in the television business or maybe the outdoor business, then all of you, all you see, you know, are those big advertisers and all that spending. 5:23 But down at the market level, you know, in a, in a mid-sized business, a business like, or a market, I mean, the market that I'm in, which is Norfolk, Virginia Beach market, there's 15,000 businesses, and most traditional media companies will only see maybe 2 to 300 of them. 5:45 Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah, just the scale of the market, and I think I wanna get into that a little later on about what tools are needed to kind of, to, uh, to kind of maximize the, the opportunity. 5:55 But, you know, thinking about local marketers, especially on, on the video side- Kind of what are the biggest challenges they face today? 6:03 Well, the biggest challenge, I think, especially on the video side, is, is targeting. I think they're kind of going down this rabbit hole, and they don't know it. 6:12 Michael, because most of the advertisers, this is the fascinating story, the vast majority of people now, businesses now buying video advertising down at the local level have never bought it before. 6:24 So all we really see in the media industry is, oh, wow, you know, OTT, so it's stuff that appears on Hulu and Sling and, uh, you know, through Premion and, and Stir and things like that. A-and that's not it. 6:38 The, the majority... True to form, it's a disruptor, OTT or video delivered by internet, the internet, as opposed to a broadcast channel or a cable wire. 6:50 Um, it's a disruptor, and disruptors always create a new marketplace. So what you've got is loads of advertisers that would just die to be on TV, typically radio advertisers, right? But they don't have the budget for it. 7:04 It's just way too much money. You know, a typical TV buy might be 10, 20, $30,000. You know, and they're over here buying TV 'cause they can afford three, four, 5,000 bucks. But now, suddenly it's available to them. 7:17 So it's opened up this tremendous new marketplace. So that was kind of a roundabout way of answering your question. Let me go back to it. You have a lot of people who are new to video. They don't understand video. 7:28 They think that the video they're buying is they're on TV, right? You know, TV is, you know, this, this little screen. But it's not mass. It's targeted. It's very, very targeted. 7:39 Might be a demographic or psychographic, or it might be an actual household that it's targeted to. 7:45 So they don't quite understand that it's a very small niche audience that they're pushing it to, which could be fine, and it meets their budget, but they're not gonna get the response they'll get if they advertise on the local CBS, Fox, you know, NBC affiliate station. 8:04 They have their region more of the... Per dollar, especially more of their target, right? They're just not- Right... you know, the, uh, people outside your target audience probably have no opportunity to see it. 8:13 And they're s- they're seeing high response rates. 8:15 So there, there are benefits to both the mass media, which everybody seems to forget, that mass media has a very strong benefit to it, and television in particular, a very strong branding benefit, 8:28 than down on the online side, the very targeted types of, uh, advertising on, on YouTube or other OTT platforms or things like that typically are far more targeted, but they have equally as strong branding capability. 8:43 So it's just the understanding the nuances of, of all these types of media that are now available to them, but particularly video, because everybody seems to be rushing toward, toward video. It's a phenomena. 8:54 It's almost an 18... It was an $18 billion marketplace in local. $18 billion spent on OTT advertising across all local markets in the US last year. That's about 14% of all local advertising expenditures. 9:09 That's phenomenal. So it came out of nowhere over the past couple of years. That's amazing. You know, high growth rate for even a already big market. Indeed, and it's gonna get bigger. It's, uh... 9:20 We're forecasting that by 2025, I think it'll be about 18% of all advertising dollars. 9:27 And if you added up all video, if you said, "Okay, let's add in cable, and let's add in, add in broadcast TV," by 2025, stuff delivered by OTT will be about 70% of all digital advertising. 70%. 9:44 You know, three times larger than broadcast TV advertising. That's incredible. 9:49 Obviously, uh, you know I've talked, but that's a, a new customer as well who's gonna be there that, that, you know, there'll be people that buy linear that'll also buy digital, but there's gonna be a lot of people, that's their first, um, first video buy to your, your kind of radio example. 10:02 Yeah. Here's an, an interesting stat, and we continue to test this. Those who are buying OTT advertising are more likely to buy it from someone other than a TV station. 10:15 So they're as likely to buy it from a newspaper and/or a radio station as they are to buy it from a TV station. And, and overall, if you look at who is buying OTT advertising, two-thirds of them are not TV customers. 10:33 So there's your completely new to TV audience. And the, and the conundrum, the p- the, the problem for TV, it's a really big problem, is that it's a typical disruptive innovation situation. 10:46 They have broadcast TV advertising, which is far higher price and has a far higher reach, and then they have this disruptive OTT, which they have to buy because their big customers... 10:56 I mean, they have to sell 'cause their big customers are buying it. So do they lose their big customers? No, they'd rather shift that, those smaller dollars into this pocket over here, so they still keep it. 11:07 Meanwhile, they have their hands full doing that, but as I just said, two-thirds of the market is at over here, not their customers at all. So they don't, they don't reach the new customer base typically. 11:18 They're just trying to sell, you know, a smaller, more targeted part, product to their, their existing television customers, and that's a... 11:26 That can be a pro- not all stations are doing that, but that can be a problem within the broadcast TV industry. Yeah, absolutely. And another area, you know, your conference a couple weeks back in Miami, 11:38 uh, which I highly recommend to all our listeners next year, um, you gave a r-really interesting talk around what you thought the world would look like in 2032, looking out 10 years. Mm-hmm. 11:48 And one thing I was struck by was when you looked back to the early part of the last decade and where Facebook was as a company as a kind of a proxy for, you know, small things that can get really large quickly 12:01 Um, I guess I got, uh, uh, several questions off this, but kind of the key one is, you know, what, I guess, function of advertising or marketing today do you see at that early stage that could be, you know, when we look up 10 years from now, could be a really big deal? 12:16 It's definitely, um, it's definitely video, but video in the form that we don't quite understand it. Uh, but we, we may under... You and I may understand it, but others say, "Ooh, video advertising. 12:28 Video advertising delivered over the internet. Okay, it's a YouTube commercial." You know, something inserted into the YouTube video that you happen to be watching on how to fix your lawnmower, right? 12:38 How to tune up your car. Um, but that's not it. I think as you look at the future and you try to understand where video is headed, or many things involving 12:52 digital advertising or internet-delivered advertising are headed, are very quick, quick bites of things. 12:59 So if you look at TikTok as an example, I don't know if TikTok is going to be it, but you damn well better study TikTok because that represents the future. 13:10 I did that thing on stage going back to Facebook because I was pissed off because as I said, "Oh, you know, you better be watching TikTok." And people are going, "Oh, you're ridiculous. That's stu..." 13:20 Well, people said I was ridiculous back in 2010 when I said, "You better keep an eye on Myspace." [laughs] Okay? But it wasn't Myspace, it was social media. 13:31 So here I am saying, "Okay, maybe it's not TikTok, maybe it's Instagram Reels or maybe it's something like that." 13:36 So the, the, the point is that if you read the book, uh, Maggie Jackson wrote it, um, called Distracted, about seven or eight years ago, you begin to get this understanding that we are multitasking more and more. 13:51 We're teaching our brains to, to do multiple things, and that we want information just like that. You know, we wanna read who's the email from, who's the subject line? Okay, click, done. 14:02 You know, I'm gonna save it for later, I'm gonna delete it. Uh, oh, I got a text message. Who's this from? I'll, I'll, I'll deal with it later. So you've got all this information coming in. 14:12 That tells us that video, and particularly video messaging 14:16 from, from marketers, really needs to be sharp, to the point, surprising, informational, all in a short period of time, which means you can't say, "Hey, we have this sale, and hurry up, it ends on Monday, and you get 10% off this and 25% on this, but here's what else you have to do, and here's our address." 14:35 No, no, no, no. Get something that really intrigues them, that catches their attention and gets them to make a decision either to go away 'cause y- you don't have what they're interested in, and, and that's valid. 14:46 You don't wanna waste people's time. Or to go over and learn more about your product. 14:51 So we're having to become more and more bizarre, more and more flamboyant, more and more in your face, surprising, delightful, all of these things just to break through all of the clutter, and so much of it is in video. 15:07 Video is definitely the third wave. First being search, second being social, now we're in the video wave. And what role... And a big part of the conference was influencers and kind of the new... 15:20 Y- you had a really good example. You were showing, you know, traditional media online versus, uh... If I remember, it was, like, a teacher in Arkansas is, you know, one of the examples. K, where... 15:30 How do you think that plays into it? Uh, y- yeah. 15:33 I think that any company that wants to understand today's or the future world of advertising and marketing, whether it's a media company or an HVAC company, a furniture store, an ad agency, anybody that wants to understand it needs to hire in some of these whippersnappers. 15:50 You know, the people who are i- in, uh, Gen Zs. The, the, uh, who, you know, the leading edge of them are probably 22, 23 years old. That's the oldest of them. 16:00 But these people have been trained, these youngsters have been trained more than any of us on media in a way that we haven't been trained. It's all this. If they watch TV, this is their TV. If they have... 16:15 I- if you ask them, this is fascinating, Michael, if, if you say, "What's prime time?" This'll, this'll separate you from the other generation. What's prime time? Okay, everybody's got it in their minds, right? 16:26 That probably your audience, well, prime time is between, you know, 8:00 and 10:00, you know, weekdays, right? No. 16:33 To them, prime time is, I don't know, it's Tuesday between 2:00 and 3:00 when you post something on Instagram and it gets the most likes and shares and things like that. That's true. 16:43 So recruiting those younger people in becomes really, really important because they, more than any other generation I have ever seen, are masters in marketing. They know how to get attention. They know how to get likes. 16:56 They know how to get shares. They know how to deal with comments and feedback and interaction. They know how to produce their own media, particularly video. So that's the generation to watch. 17:07 I think we have a lot to learn from these young people. Excellent. Another kinda area of your talk was this kinda three waves framework, um, with the third wave being video. Can you kinda walk our... 17:21 walk us through that and kind of, uh, kinda how it applies to video? Sure. 17:24 I referred to it just a little bit earlier, but if you look at the internet in terms of revenue, uh, and, or, or, or, uh, expenditures, advertising expenditures, which is how we look at things, you can see very clearly there are three waves. 17:39 The first wave from 2000 when the internet really got its legs as an advertising medium, and the first billion dollars per year in advertising was spent that year. 17:48 You look at from 2000 to 2010, very clearly it was search advertising which was the biggest form. Not banners, but search. And search advertising was really everybody going, "Oh, it's the internet. 18:01 Let's get signed up and let's find out what's here." So they searched, right? They searched first on AltaVista, you know, and then went to Google, and then Google made an advertising medium out of it. 18:12 'cause that's where all the audience was. The second wave was, okay, we know where everybo- we know where everything is and what's out there. Now we know where everybo- now we wanna know where everybody is. 18:22 So they migrated to MySpace and to Facebook and things like that, and th- those companies, particularly Facebook, made an audience out of it and generated revenue. 18:31 So you could see social advertising going up like that from 2010 to 2020. And then right around 2018 or 2019, we saw this other line begin to cross it, and it was video, and we went, "Ooh." So that's the third wave. 18:45 It's gonna be video. The characteristic that I... 18:48 A- and the reason I mention that, while it's interesting to see the internet in decades and in types of revenue generated in each decade being dominant, the very interesting thing about it, Michael, is in the first decade, there was one company associated with search, you know, that wave, and in the second decade, there was one company associated with social, and the third wave, there ain't one company associated with video. 19:13 Particularly at the local level, local advertisers need help, a vast amount of help, with producing a video, placement of the video, what should they say, what should they wear, what should the lighting look like? 19:25 It's not like social where they can say, "Okay, we can just shoot a picture and post something and type some words here," or search, where they can say, "Okay, we'll just buy HVAC dealer in Baltimore, you know, and bid $50 a click on it." 19:39 Video's much more complex. 19:41 That's where local agents of some sort, whether it's an agency or a media company or somebody else, really need to come in and help them because there ain't no big internet company that's just going to have a DIY platform that works. 19:55 Yeah. I mean, I, I guess the earlier que- conversation about the advantage locals- local sellers have, what's the role of the agency there? Do you see agencies becoming more important than they are today? 20:08 Yeah, I guess a- another way to ask it, are, do you see an increase or decrease in brands buying media direct without an agency because of the complexity of video? There's, uh, uh, there's an increase 20:22 across the board of people seeking help, businesses seeking help in marketing. Because, you know, if you look at it, like in the olden days, which was I think before the year 2000, 20:35 um, if you wanted to buy advertising, you had to call somebody that owned a medium and buy advertising in their medium, whether it was a billboard company or a direct mail company or a Yellow Pages company, whatever. 20:47 Now, you own the medium. You know, it's your own website or your own mobile app if you have one, or your own email list. You have your own audience. Now you have to figure out how to use it. 20:57 So figuring that out is not easy. You're gonna seek help, because you're an expert at arranging flowers or baking pies or whatever it is that you do. You're not an expert at marketing. 21:07 So you're gonna do one of two things. You're gonna hire people in, and we see a lot of that occurring, particularly hiring in younger people who know about this stuff. 21:16 So you're gonna hire people in to manage your Facebook page and craft the email and know what to put in the subject line and what day of the week to send it out, things like that. You don't have time for that. 21:24 Or if you have a little bit of money, you're gonna go to an agency. Or if you don't quite have that much money, but you buy advertising, you're gonna rely on your local media rep. 21:34 About five years ago, the traditional business, local business that spent money on advertising dealt with eight different companies. Today, three. They deal with three companies. 21:47 So they're paring it down and going, "Nah, we're gonna work with maybe one or two or three people who can help me understand all of this video stuff and how to produce it and where to place it." 21:59 And that person might also be selling them newspaper advertising or TV advertising or cable advertising or radio advertising. 22:06 So that's the path we see things taking, either hiring somebody in, doing it on their own, which might be a bit of a mistake, you know, so they ha- unless they have full-time people, of course, or working with an agency or a media company that also has its own medium to sell. 22:23 Interesting. Um, kind of we had the opportunity to, to give a talk at, at, uh, the Broad Conference, and kind of one of the things we went through is to try to estimate the total number of, of local advertisers, 22:35 and your point, you know, it's a really big market, but when we compared it to the, the number of people that buy national television, there were, you know, roughly 800 local video advertisers for every one national video advertiser, which means a, you know, a lot of fragmentation. 22:50 Um, you've kind of touched on this before, but what are the key areas, you know, if you're looking at this from a technology perspective, that need to be built specifically for the local video market, 22:59 uh, to reach its full potential? Well, I think the company that is dealing in video, the company that might, you know, help another business with video, 23:10 um, is really need, they're gonna have a, a technical proficiency, a production proficiency. They might need an HD camera. They, they will need, you know, a, a, an HD camera, ultra HD, and that's not much money. 23:25 It's what? 1,000 bucks, you know, uh, uh, at, at, at minimum. That's, that's where they start. 23:31 Um, good sound equipment, and, and I, I don't wanna stress it too much because a kid with a, a good iPhone can produce a pretty decent video and edit it too, and it might be acceptable, but I think that bar is going to raise as more people see higher definition video and better sound and things like that. 23:50 So just really simple things like a lavalier instead of, you know, having a camera with a little microphone up here and a guy standing next to his plumbing truck talking about why he's the greatest plumber on Earth. 24:01 So the basic proficiency, equipment, audio, lighting, and things like that need to be learned. Really basic, not so sophisticated as, say, a television station, but I think the bar is gonna raise over time. 24:14 I also think there's a significant amount of creativity and editing skills that are required, and this is not easy to come by. So how do you tell that plumber- Who's leaning against his truck. 24:27 You know, what to say, what should he say, and how long should it be? It's very easy if you're not skilled to write something that's four or five minutes long. That doesn't work. 24:37 You need something that's about 30 seconds, or if it's a commercial, maybe 15 seconds. It's gonna get squeezed into YouTube somewhere, right? And it's gotta be the exact right thing to say, not wordy. 24:48 That's not an easy task, and I think that's gonna be the w- most difficult one, 'cause the advertisers themselves aren't gonna be able to do it for the most part. 24:58 They're just not skilled at, at writing script and then editing it. 25:02 Um, and then the, the media companies themselves, they have basic production skills or basic media skills, might not have s- skills specific to scripting video. 25:11 So all those laid-off newspaper reporters, they could probably find some pretty good jobs in scripting video for businesses. Absolutely. I think those are the basic things. 25:20 And then on top of that, Michael, as you know, you're gonna need to understand placement, uh, pricing of it, um, you know, target ability. I mean, all those things. So I, it... 25:32 Right now it's very simple, but I think over time, and over time is the next three or four years, the bar is really gonna raise, be raised quite a bit. Excellent. 25:43 Uh, just a few more questions, but, you know, another one on the, the conference. You had a really interesting slide that showed 25:50 marketing and advertising jobs being roughly the same probably at the start of the pandemic, but since, the, those going in completely opposite directions now to where marketing is a much greater share. 26:03 I guess, how, how do you define those positions? And then is there any kind of crossover or blending of the responsibilities as... Kinda I guess a- asking this from an, an ad technology versus martech, um, perspective. 26:15 I've always seen those technologies kind of starting to merge over the long term. You know, is that what you're seeing as well? Yeah. Um, the, the data was from BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistic. 26:25 It showed about a decade ago there were far more, uh, advertising jobs, you know, almost a billion, uh, a million, I'm sorry, advertising jobs as opposed to marketing jobs. 26:36 The definition is, an advertising job is someone who is selling advertising, helping a business develop, you know, its advertising and then placing it somewhere. 26:48 A marketing job is everything, you know, that's kind of related to that but doesn't involve advertising. 26:54 So if you wanna develop a flyer for a company that you put on some windshields, or you wanna design a logo, or you wanna put on a, or an event or help a, a business, you know, with some sort of event, uh, it, that, that it has, a conference or promotional event of some sort. 27:12 So all of those nuanced things that help get the word out about a business, that's, that's marketing. Uh, designing of, you know, packaging, designing of a product, placement of stuff on the aisles, right? 27:24 So if you look at that, wow, there was a huge difference between the number of jobs in advertising, almost a million, and the number of jobs in marketing. 27:31 But about five or six years ago, the lines crossed, and now they're far wider. But when you looked at what the pandemic did, all of a sudden the margin between the two is even wider. It's twice as high. 27:43 So what happened is during the pandemic, lots of businesses went, "Holy crap, we can't advertise. We don't have enough money. But we can sure as hell market." 27:53 Which means we need to update our website, we need to get some videos on our website, we need to push out some more social posts. These are all marketing tasks, not advertising tasks. So they began hiring. 28:04 So there are more and more and more jobs in marketing, and fewer and fewer jobs in the business of selling advertising, because as I said, the deer now have the guns, okay? 28:16 The businesses [laughs] themselves can market themselves. The better ones or the smarter ones are really gonna need to know that... uh, really do know that they need to do more than just handle marketing internally. 28:28 There's other advertising they need to do. There's more sophistication than they can develop or manage internally. Interesting. What kind of... 28:39 A- another question we ask all our guests, you know, um, if our audience wants to dive deeper into kind of local advertising and topics we've discussed, uh, any recommendations on what they should be reading? Sure. 28:50 You know, I, I, I get a lot of stuff in my, uh, in my inbox in, in, in email, and a lot of it gets the delete button after two seconds. Uh, but I look at things very, very quickly. 29:03 So the s- the stuff that tends to stick around in my inbox, the newsletter or the websites that I go to, uh, are MediaPost, uh, Adweek, um, Advertising Age, um, you know, uh, things like that. Um, 29:21 um, State of the Screens. I don't know who does that. Who does that, Michael? Do you know? [laughs] That's a great publication. That's a great title. 29:27 [laughs] Uh, there's another one, a very bizarre one that a, that a friend does in New York, uh, uh, Mitch Oscar, uh, that's, it's fantastic. It's called Hocus Focus. I think you have to be invited onto that list. 29:40 It's all kinds of, you know, bizarre and interesting things, but it kind of shapes a picture of what the, the future is. Um, there's stuff that Emarketer puts out. 29:49 I find theirs to be an aggregate of information, so it's not exactly right. It's everybody's information, you know, consensus estimates. But you get a little information from there. They have some interesting things. 30:00 The trade associations, um, and trade publications like, um, the NAB, uh, National Association of Broadcasters, RAB, Radio Advertising Bureau, TVB, uh, they'll often either pick up on things or put out things themselves. 30:18 The research is often biased toward making their type of, you know, advertising look good. The Outdoor Advertising Association. So all those associations tend to provide pieces to the puzzle of, of what's going on. 30:33 I'll tell you another- Secret of how I view things and how I, uh, uh, what helps me predict what's, what's going to happen is I ignore stuff as long as I possibly can. 30:45 And then when I just can't ignore it anymore, when people ask me questions and I have to say, "I don't know," and I don't like to say I don't know, I'm just one of those guys. 30:54 You know, when, when the questions are strong enough that I have to go, "Well, I better brush up on this," um, that's when it pops onto my radar screen. So, so there's just too much to track. 31:07 I didn't track, uh, Clubhouse for a long time, and I thought, "Ugh, that's ridiculous. I don't even own, own an iPhone. I hope it fails." 31:15 And sure enough, Clubhouse did not become the thing that everybody [laughs] thought it would, so it worked. But TikTok did not work, because TikTok for me was like, "Oh, this is ridiculous. Yes, I've seen it. 31:26 It's stupid. I hope it fails." And then it got to the point, I would say about a year, year and a half ago, where I thought, "This can't be ignored anymore." 31:35 National advertisers now, 40% of national advertisers, brand advertisers, are using TikTok in some way. That's a big number. 4% of local businesses are using TikTok. 31:48 In other words, 90% of local businesses aren't using it. But why am I tracking it? Can't ignore it anymore, and n- national is always the forerunner of what happens locally, so it's gonna come up pretty quick. 32:00 And like I said before, it might not be TikTok. It could be Instagram Reels. It's gonna be some short burst of video that has aggregated all these people and has influencers in it. 32:10 It's kind of a different form of video advertising. So those are the sources I typically look at to get information. Excellent, and I know, uh, you were in the middle of doing the advertiser survey. 32:21 Is that still open to our, our audience if they wanna be a part of it? Uh, it closed out the first week in April, so no. Okay. Uh, it's, uh, it's big this year. It's very big. We're actually doing it twice a year. 32:35 This is the first year we've decided to do it twice 'cause it's gotten so big and because things are changing, you know, a lot quicker. But it's the largest survey of local advertisers in the country. 32:44 We'll begin to, to, uh, uh, trickle out some of the results of it in probably late June. We do a Chart of the Week summer series, which is really, really popular. 32:53 If you go to our website, uh, and look at surveys, um, you'll, you'll be able to see some of the, uh, i- initial findings of that, but we'll have it again in the fall. Okay. Excellent. 33:04 We'll look forward to, to covering that in the newsletter for sure. Well, Gordon, I appreciate your time, and I know our audience is gonna, uh, really enjoy the conversation, so thank you. 33:12 Thanks, Michael, and thanks for being at our conference. Your, uh, session was great, and highly recommend to everybody CrossScreen Media. It's, uh, it's one of the... one of the things I actually read. 33:21 I never delete it. I go, "Ooh, here it is." Sometimes I say, "Well, let me wait till later," 'cause it does take four or five minutes to read, which is a lifetime. But anyway, [laughs] It is... 33:29 thanks for it, but it's a lot of great stuff, so thanks for putting that out, and thanks for having me on the show. All right. Thank you. [upbeat music] Thank you for joining us on this episode of Screen Wars. 33:39 I hope you enjoyed the discussion. You can find out more about CrossScreen Media at crossscreenmedia.com. Please don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, State of the Screens. 33:49 You can find us on social media @crossscreenmedia. Join us next time for more insights and analysis straight from the experts. [upbeat music]
