Michael Beach, CEO of Cross Screen Media and author of “Screen Wars,” discusses the evolution of convergent TV advertising. He explains the shift from linear to streaming, audience-based planning, and the role data analytics plays in convergent TV. Michael also shares practical advice for maximizing reach and data-driven insights that point to the future of TV consumption. Valuable perspectives on navigating the changing landscape of video advertising and audience engagement.

Episode Transcript

Announcer: Attention, marketers! Get ready to transform your advertising strategies with Bigeye’s new 2024 National Research Study, Retail Revolution. This in-depth report explores the rapidly changing retail landscape. You’ll find valuable consumer insights across key areas, including shopping behaviors, direct-to-consumer brands, sustainability, brand collaborations, retail advertising, influencer marketing, and AI. To download your free copy of Bigeye’s Retail Revolution, go to Bigeyeagency.com/retail-revolution. That’s Bigeyeagency.com/retail-revolution. Reshaped by technological advancements, new consumer preferences, and global events, Bigeye’s Retail Revolution is your guide to the future of retail marketing and advertising. Join the Retail Revolution!

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:

Michael Beach: Broadband adoption was about five years ahead of streaming adoption. So when you became a broadband only household, you may go five years before you actually become a streaming household. And then once we pass a hundred million households five years ago that had streaming, now you can have a mass audience.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency, growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. The media landscape continually evolves with new technologies and changing consumer behaviors, shaping how brands connect with consumers. One of the most significant shifts in recent years is the rise of convergent TV, which blends traditional linear television with digital streaming platforms. Understanding and leveraging this convergence is critical for advertisers aiming to capture increasingly fragmented viewer attention. Our guest today is an expert on this topic and has been at the forefront of the convergent TV revolution. Michael Beach is the Chief Executive Officer of Cross Screen Media, a marketing analytics and software company enabling marketers to plan, activate, and measure video advertising. Before establishing Cross Screen Media, Michael co-founded Targeted Victory, which became a dominant digital agency in politics with over 800 clients. In 2020, Michael launched Screen Wars Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on the convergent TV industry. Michael is also the founder and editor of State of the Screens, a weekly newsletter focused on video advertising. In addition, Michael has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, and NPR’s Planet Money podcast. He’s also the author of a new book, Screen Wars: Win the Battle for Attention with Convergent TV. To discuss some of its key ideas, I’m delighted that Michael is joining us today from Washington, D.C. Michael, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Michael Beach: Oh, thanks for having me.

Adrian Tennant: Well, first of all, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, can you define what convergent TV is?

Michael Beach: Yeah, it’s a great question. And in the use case of the book, we really focus just on any video that appears actually on a television screen. Obviously, there’s a wider kind of arena of video that is competing for attention. And that’s probably part of a broader story we’ll tell. But in the book, we really focused on linear TV and streaming TV as the two areas, because we look at those as being a substitute in kind of in direct competition for attention, as opposed to something like short-form video that maybe is adding time to overall media diet, but it’s not necessarily taking away from what we call television.

Adrian Tennant: You’ve been in this space as long as anybody. I’m curious, Michael, what led you to focus on convergent TV?

Michael Beach: Really, it started probably more than a dozen years ago when I co-founded an ad agency in the Washington, D.C. market that was focused on political and public affairs. And we were a digital native agency. And a lot of times a political organization would hire a linear buyer and then they would hire a digital buyer and then there’d be this kind of zero-sum argument for resources. And so we explored a lot to where, you know, initially, we just started to make an argument for why digital is better, but not necessarily understanding linear TV, you know, the reach and the frequency and all the things that make it unique. And so we really went to school on offering all of those as one thing together. And this is 2013, 2014. So a long time ago. And learned a lot in that process about what the trade-offs are and where and how people make decisions. You know, I started Cross Green Media in 2017 and went to the kind of the wider local advertising ecosystem and they had the exact same problem where they couldn’t figure out the mix between the two. And because one minute if you’re selling, you know, a car to truck and tenders, it’s one audience. If you’re trying to fill a movie theater, it’s another restaurant. And I think that’s where the light bulb went off for us that this one area is going to be a hundred billion dollar market when you combine streaming TV advertising and linear TV advertising. And nobody’s really getting it right because they’re kind of starting from wherever they’re most comfortable.

Adrian Tennant: As you mentioned, you founded Cross Screen Media in 2017 and are its CEO. What services do you offer, and what types of clients do you typically work with?

Michael Beach: We work through ad agencies and we have some media seller customers, but our bread and butter are local ad agencies who either are heavy on linear TV today or heavy on streaming, but want to offer both. And the idea for there to be convergence, like the consumer is converging, right? Like they are going from being a hundred percent linear a decade or so ago to eventually there will be a hundred percent streaming in terms of how they consume video. But right now we’re in this messy middle period. And the brand advertiser really just wants a solution to the problem, right? They want to get their ad in front of their targeted consumer. And that leads to our customer, who is the ad agency. They may be really strong in linear TV, but they don’t understand streaming, but they want to package it together. So they’ll use our media planning software. So it’s three components. There’s planning, there’s activations to the ability to actually buy streaming TV advertising. And then there’s the measurement component of it for measuring linear and streaming TV together at the local level. And then we also have some digital native agencies, which is kind of where we came from, that want to either offer linear TV advertising or at least communicate to their customers, okay, we know we went up on TV and ran an ad during Sunday Night Football. Here’s how we’re going to supplement it with streaming because of the people we missed. And that’s our bread and butter.

Adrian Tennant: For over seven years, you’ve been publishing a weekly newsletter focused on video advertising called State of the Screens. It’s one of my go-to resources for industry statistics, and I’m sure for many other people as well. Michael, what prompted you to write a book?

Michael Beach: Yeah, so we’re just over 375 editions of the newsletter now. And we’re probably just passing 250. So I’ve written every week for seven years. And the newsletter was amazing, because it allowed us to get our message out every week and in a rapidly changing environment. So new data would come out, you know, right now we’re in earnings season, Netflix posted earnings last week, and how many subscribers they have and all these statistics. So we’ll write a newsletter about what that means for the convergent TV advertising ecosystem. But the newsletter was very reactive. It was basically saying, this is what’s happened in the last three months or the last 12 months. And it was also very short. It’s on average less than 800 words a week. It takes between two to three minutes to read it, but we can’t really tell a bigger story. And so we wanted to go back and say, you know, here’s how we’ve gotten to the point where we are today. So we went all the way back to 1950 in the book and talked about how linear TV rose post-World War II. Then when cable came along, then when broadband came along, and now streaming is following broadband. And then the next part was, what does the future look like for an advertiser? How are people going to consume TV and how are we going to reach them? And then the third part of the book was really case studies and tactics for how to actually thrive in this new world.

Adrian Tennant: The first part of your book, Screen Wars, is titled How We Watch TV, in which, as you said, you describe the evolution of television, the proliferation of cable and then streaming services, and audiences’ changing viewing habits. Michael, for some context, how did the TV industry grow from just a handful of broadcast networks to the hundreds of niche cable channels and streaming platforms we have today?

Michael Beach: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think when you look back on the nascent market, even when we all started to get black and white television and then cable television through the 1960s, the market still for advertising wasn’t that large. And so sustaining the three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, that was a good business for the three of them. But as we got into the late 70s and early 1980s, the market had gotten large enough to where you could run a niche business and make a living. So that’s where HBO comes along, and ESPN, and the rise of cable television. The business model couldn’t have existed 20 years before, and the delivery mechanism didn’t also exist because you were limited in the number of broadcast channels. So cable TV rises up, and suddenly we go from having three stations till we get into the 90s, we have over 100. And still a great business, right? Because there’s enough to go around to make everybody whole and be, you know, extremely profitable business. Well, then streaming starts to pop up in the late 2000s. And again, early on very small business can’t really sustain anybody, even a Netflix. When they launch streaming, they’re still relying on their DVD rental business for a long time to generate cash flow for running the company, but adoption picks up. And then all of a sudden today, you can now run a streaming only business at scale. And so now Netflix is, you know, the largest media company in the world from a market capitalization standpoint, a larger than even like a Disney. And that’s because streaming now can sustain a whole business. And so now you’re starting to see, you know, a lot of networks pop up that are even focused on niche streaming. So we’re gonna have a sports only offering soon from, you know, ESPN and Warner Brothers and others, we’ve got kids only offerings. And we’re kind of this transition period where these media companies are still making most of their money off of linear TV. But there are streaming-only partners that are only in streaming. And soon, the traditional media partners, if all goes as planned, their streaming offerings will be profitable because that’s the future of their business.

Adrian Tennant: That’s interesting. That’s the business side of the equation. What impact have technological advancements like smart TVs and broadband internet had on consumers’ viewing habits?

Michael Beach: Yeah, so when we started Cross Screen Media in 2017, we looked back at the previous eight years when we were at the agency. And one of the interesting things, we dove headlong into mobile probably as early as 2009, 2010. But it seemed like every year for five or six years was the year of mobile, right? Like this is going to be the year of mobile, but it never arrived until it really hit in a big way. And so we started to look at what happened here? Like, well, you’ve got mobile phone adoption, and you’ve got this lag between when people actually get a smartphone. And when they start to consume content, then you’ve got another lag for when advertisers react and start to shift budget there. And why that was important is because we were looking at streaming. Well, what is this going to look like? Because we don’t want to be too early into streaming, but we knew it was coming. And so for us, we looked at broadband adoption was that broadband adoption was about five years ahead of streaming adoption. So when you became a broadband-only household, you may go five years before you actually become a streaming household. And then once we pass 100 million households five years ago that had streaming, now you can have a mass audience. So just people getting broadband in their homes alone was the initial limiting factor. But the other thing is that there’s no constraint on the amount of content. And that’s a new thing for the entertainment industry, that before you had your constraint with the three broadcast stations, and then you got cable, and you still had a limit on the number of cable channels that could get delivered to your house. Today you have no limit. And then if you’re a programmer before you had a 24-hour-a-day limit on, you know, you would program out a day, right? You only had one 8 p.m. slot, one 9 p.m. slot. Well, now we’re watching all of our content on demand. And so there’s unlimited shelf space. And so you’re seeing these streaming channels that have tens of thousands of shows more than you could ever watch in your lifetime because there is no constraint on the amount of time. So those two things, you know, the adoption of broadband and the elimination of any kind of constraint on the amount of content that we can you know, have access to are completely changing how we watch TV.

Adrian Tennant: Many years ago, I worked for the Discovery Channel. And of course, around this time of year, every year, it’s Shark Week. And that was really an event. Fast forward to today, it’s still an event. But somebody who’s really interested in sharks can pretty much watch sharks 24 seven if they want to.

Michael Beach: That’s right.

Adrian Tennant: Well, the second part of Screen Wars examines how TV advertising will work in the future. You discuss the current state of the convergent TV advertising market and anticipate strategic changes we’ll need to make in our media planning. What are the most significant challenges advertisers face when transitioning from linear to convergent TV advertising?

Michael Beach: I think they’ve got, especially if they’re coming from linear, they’re used to age and gender as the audience and the currency for how they buy advertising. And the shift to convergence, there is definitely age and gender as a kind of a bedrock, but the move to audiences is probably the biggest component that we see. And one thing that we do that’s unique is that Yes, we look at digital streaming and mobile video with audiences, but we also look at linear TV with audiences just to put them into as much of an apples-to-apples as we can. But then we’ll also look at digital with age and gender, because that might be data that we’re getting on linear to put that into an apples-to-apples comparison. But I think preparing for a world where you understand that your customer’s target is probably a lot smaller than you think. And if you just look at the number of people that buy There’s 120 million plus TV households, but the number one car, the Ford F-150, will sell 100,000 to 140,000 units in a year, and that’s the number one car. And so, you know, even a fraction of the audience, less than 1% of households on a given year will purchase the number one car, and you go down to the number 10 car, and it’s, you know, a fraction of that. That’s one thing we learned in politics when we started to look at who are the people are likely to vote in election that live in a battleground state that are a swing voter. We found that it was about three to 10% of adults fell into that audience in any given media market. And so why were we optimizing a plan for everyone who’s 35 plus or 55 plus or? 18 to 49 when we really just wanted to focus on those people and both with how we bought linear television and how we bought streaming. That’s the first hurdle. And then I think it’s really just having a long term plan because you don’t become what we call cross screen overnight. And so one of our frameworks is called the three phases of becoming cross screen. And the first phase is that you offer linear TV and streaming TV inside one company. So say it’s an agency, maybe you’ve got a team of people that do linear and a team of people that do streaming. So they’re not necessarily connected, but they’re under one roof. And then you go into phase two, where you actually start to get a team of people that can do both. So you’ve got still one person that has a skill set for linear TV planning and buying and measurement, one person that has streaming TV planning, buying and measurement, but they’re at least starting to compare plans and offer one media plan to the customer. The future phase three, which is where we kind of accelerate our customers into that market, is where the same person on your team understands both linear TV and streaming TV. And that is a data analytics and software problem. But once you reach that, you are truly offering conversion TV.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

Caroline Florence: Hi, I’m Caroline Florence, the author of Data Storytelling in Marketing: How to Tell Persuasive Stories Through Data.  My book provides a practical guide for marketers to develop compelling evidence-based stories influencing decision-making and driving change. I share proven methods and real-world examples to help you create impactful data stories that resonate with your audience. breaking down key concepts, and explaining how to transform complex data into engaging narratives that inspire action. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on  Data Storytelling in Marketing when you order directly from my publisher at KoganPage.com by entering the exclusive promo code Bigeye25 at checkout.  Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and the UK.  I hope my book helps you use data storytelling to create more effective, persuasive marketing stories. Thank you!

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Michael Beach, the CEO of Cross Screen Media and the author of Screen Wars: Win the Battle for Attention with Convergent TV. You’ve spoken about the centrality of audience-based planning. The TV industry’s struggle to measure audiences amid these evolving viewing habits has seen new competitors like ComScore, VideoAmp, and iSpot.tv challenge longtime ratings provider Nielsen. Michael, where are we today? And how should advertisers leverage data analytics to optimize their ad campaigns?

Michael Beach: Yeah, that’s the multi-billion dollar question for the industry. And what we’ve kind of found is that there are really two worlds at once. And we talk about this a little bit in the book, but there is the kind of the New York upfronts, Super Bowl advertising, your top 200 brands that buy, 90% of national linear TV advertising. And then you’ve got the roughly 1 million video advertisers in the US that are mostly local, more niche, that prop up a service like Facebook or YouTube, but are becoming just as big of buyers as a group. And they behave totally differently. The group that does the upfronts, which kind of makes all the noise about measurement, they want to have a currency that both the buyer and the seller agree on. which has been a great for Nielsen. It’s still age and gender dominant. They don’t want to adopt a comScore or VideoAmp when the seller is using another service. They want both the agency and the seller to use the exact same currency, which is limiting how that market moves. And then you look at the market where we are in, you know, local, pretty much 100% of our customer base is audience-based advertising. even if the guarantee they’re getting from the TV station is age and gender, and they still want to plan against audiences. Why that matters is that it’s like the digital mindset is that the people that come from that world actually are not concerned with the buyer and the seller having the same data. If you tell one of our customers that they can get better data than the seller and have, you know, asymmetric information, have an advantage to where maybe the TV spot is getting priced on, you know, 18 to 49 year olds, And the rating thinks that 3% of the audience is 18 to 49 year olds. But we run our data and say, well, we’re trying to sell pickup trucks and 7.5% of the audience is actually pickup truck people. That’s actually an advantage for us. And so our customers are fine with that. That’s why they’ve adopted advanced currencies faster, and everything from set-top-bikes data to now ACR data, because it’s not a deal-breaker that the seller doesn’t use the exact same data. So those two worlds are kind of happening at the exact same time. In the trades, you really only read about the national problem, because it is the biggest part of the market. It’s by far the largest spend per advertiser. But where we are, it’s kind of like an inverted problem. We’re coming at it from a completely different angle.

Adrian Tennant: I think I heard you use an acronym there, ACR. What is that?

Michael Beach: Yeah, traditionally, you had panel-based measurement from Nielsen, where I think today they have 40,000 households where they are opt in, it’s extremely high quality, they were able to track all their viewership to the person level in the household. And that is great for a national advertiser. So you basically take ESPN at 8pm. the 40,000 households, they will get enough sample to tell you at the national level how many people are watching it. And they can even give you some more advanced demographics. The problem is when you break that down at the local level, so there’s 210 media markets across the country, you take that 40,000 sample and you divide it by 210, you now can only measure the largest things, the largest channels and the biggest demos. So you cannot do any kind of audience-based analysis And so what happened was, you know, this came out of politics as the primary driver in the 2012 campaign from President Obama’s campaign, taking set-top box data. So at that point, you had about 18 to 30 million households total that produced set-top box data. And you could use that as a sample to where all of a sudden you can start to measure cable at the local level, more niche broadcast local level. You can start to measure audiences at the local level. That was your first big data source. And then now ACR data has come along, and that is actually the smart TV itself producing viewership data, both streaming and linear consumption, and at a much more granular level. Think about every second you’re viewing is able to produce rather than just say a 15-minute increment or a 30-minute increment. Now people have adopted those currencies because they want to look at linear and streaming together when they’re producing measurements. Those are not in any kind of approved framework at the national level. So even if you read what just happened at the upfronts, people are using services like VideoAmp and iSpot, and they’re very successful companies, but they’re using them as a secondary measurement. Nielsen is still the primary measurement. At the local level and the more direct-to-consumer and kind of audience-based, They’ve adopted these currencies as a primary thing much faster than anything you’re seeing at the national level. Part of that’s that they don’t have a choice because they can’t measure their target audience at the local level using Nielsen.

Adrian Tennant: Got it. The third part of Screen Wars is titled Winning the Battle for Attention with Convergent TV. It focuses on strategies to capture and retain viewer attention and highlights the importance of adapting to changing viewer behaviors and preferences. Michael, we’re in a presidential election year. What are some key takeaways from political campaigns that can be applied to brands’ TV advertising?

Michael Beach: Yeah, there’s a couple of things. Again, political campaigns kind of adopted this more convergent TV earlier, and there’s probably two reasons. One, they are extremely audience-centric. I think everyone’s familiar with terms like swing voters and battleground states and all these things we hear on TV all the time. And the other thing is that they actually start over every two years. And so you get to start over, and essentially you don’t have to necessarily adopt the playbook that you ran during the election before. There is some carryover, but nothing like what you see if you’re a permanent organization that You did back-to-school planning last year, and you’re starting with the plan you did the year before. You’ll see these more radical leaps forward from political campaigns. The example I used about the 2012 election, even in 2010, we hadn’t even heard of set-top-box data at that point. And then two years later, it’s a major thing. And then by two years after that, All the big campaigns are using that same technology and a much faster adoption than you would see in the kind of the general advertising market. And then what they’re really good at is, again, understanding their audience and putting it at the center of their campaign. Right now, we are in a presidential election and people are trying to reach swing voters in four to seven states. Some estimates are it’s as low as 6% of the population of the country. is the target audience, they run a test-and-learn mentality. And so part of that is that you get rapid feedback from polling along the way to where you understand, are you moving this audience or not? And then you can, again, just change the plan along the way. Nothing is set in stone. And so we find people working political campaigns right now might be up until midnight, changing a plan that’s gonna start the next day. And you would never see that necessarily in a more traditional advertising format. And so the iteration is extremely fast. I think combining those two things is just a game-changer.

Adrian Tennant: How can planners at smaller independent agencies maximize the reach and frequency of campaigns across convergent TV platforms?

Michael Beach: Yeah, it’s a great opportunity for small brands and small agencies alike. It’s a huge opportunity because you still have a mispricing in the market today. Because even though a lot of the buzz is about streaming and 80% of what we write about in our newsletters about streaming, if you look at it from an audience-based perspective, it’s still relatively underpriced. And that is probably the most contentious thing that we talk about whenever we get on panels, is that we just think streaming is dramatically underpriced. And that’s really because, again, when you figure out who your target audience is, And you price against a linear spot and you realize, well, I ran to 100 people, but only six of them were my target. I mean, 94 of those people was not my target. That, you know, $10 CPM now is over $120 eCPM. And if you look at streaming where maybe you paid $40 or $50 for a CPM, what you thought was way overpriced. but they got it close to rate 50% of people with a target. All of a sudden the inventory looks completely different. And one thing for us is when we look at all of our media, social video, mobile video, and our planning environment when a new customer onboards, the most expensive thing they’re buying almost every single time is Facebook and Instagram. And so even though it’s highly targeted, it has a really high ECPM when you factor in any kind of attention. And they’re a lot of times paying more for that than they are for a linear TV ad to reach the right person, but they don’t really ever see that. And so that mispricing the market is actually an opportunity where we will see smaller brands actually go after that inventory first. rather than trying to fight for the most commonly bought program, trying to go to the NFL football or news, they may find the underpriced assets and build reach that way.

Adrian Tennant: You earlier characterized this moment in time as kind of “the messy middle.” Linear TV and streaming services coexist. When do we reach a tipping point? When do we move to streaming services being the majority?

Michael Beach: Yeah, that’s a great question. For us, the NFL media deal that goes into, I believe, 2032 right now is, when we talk about a decade out, there’s going to be significant linear TV advertising just because of that, because of how much of the audience is sports today versus 10 years ago. And that’s still the most profitable way to pay for these sports rights deals. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. You’ve just seen the NBA right now is closing off a media deal that’s more streaming than it was the last time, but still has significant coverage on Linear. So as long as there are sports that are on Linear, it will be in the plan until the end there. It’s all the other programs. Basically, scripted programming has gone almost entirely streaming. It’s virtually 100% on demand. Now, if it’s on linear, it’s, it’s through on demand. And then, you know, streaming is taken over. News has not really found a home yet on streaming. And that is probably from a societal standpoint, one of the biggest areas that kind of needs to get fixed because the business model to run news on linear only is starting to collapse because they can’t, you know, they’re losing subscribers on pay TV. They’re losing advertisers, but they haven’t yet found a way to deliver that 24-hour news through streaming in a profitable way. And then sports is still able to make tons of money through linear today. They haven’t had to figure out streaming yet. They’re able to move at a little slower pace, but scripted content has gone basically all streaming. And we think news is going the same direction, but they just have not figured out how to make money from it yet.

Adrian Tennant: That’s interesting. Well, we’ve talked about technological innovations driving the market in some respects. Do you foresee artificial intelligence and machine learning impacting TV advertising strategies in the future?

Michael Beach: Absolutely. I think that, you know, even if you look at our planning software, it runs a number of simulations at the same time to produce a plan. So it’s more kind of machine learning than artificial intelligence. But why that is important is that there are a huge number of combinations of a media plan that could deliver a similar result. And if you think about these more advanced AI models that could do that in even more granularity faster, we see that being a huge area for improvement. But it’s moving away from having, again, that spreadsheet where you know, well, I’m going to buy ESPN and I’m going to buy CNN and Fox News and the Golf Channel and CNBC. And then I’m going to go over and buy these specific programs. When you actually let the algorithms work, They pull in a lot of combinations of things that are counterintuitive, but are potentially underpriced inventory that has unique reach in the market. And I think that artificial intelligence could do that on steroids.

Adrian Tennant: It’s a fascinating prospect. The book’s been out for a few weeks now. What’s the reaction to it been?

Michael Beach: It’s been really positive for me. You know, even though I’ve written the newsletter so many times, putting a book out there is a pretty big to try to make a coherent argument in 100 plus pages. And I think I’ve gotten great feedback. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the launch team. I think the number of people that proactively offered to help and help drive it to be number one on Amazon. I can’t really explain how positive experience that was. The day the publisher took the draft away from me and said we’ve got to go with it was also the second best day of the whole process because I would have modified that thing forever.

Adrian Tennant: It’s very different from writing a newsletter where you know it has a natural expiration date. The book is a little bit different.

Michael Beach: Yeah. And hopefully, I mean, we wrote it in years, uh, or decades really. And hopefully it’s got a little bit of staying power. And I think initially when I wrote it, we were going to overall attention for video and we were touching on social and we were touching on the metaverse and all these things that are competing for our time. And that was just kind of an unmanageable thing. Like that was going to be a 300 page book and we cut it down and said, we’re just going to focus on TV, which I’m extremely glad we did. And you know, no one has really said, well, I wish there was more about mobile. Even though I think that’s a big missing piece, you know, when we were an agency, we were responsible for everything, right? So, like, we had to think about social video and mobile and all these things, but that’s for a later date.

Adrian Tennant: Well, I look forward to seeing what book you write next, Michael.

Michael Beach: Absolutely. Thank you.

Adrian Tennant: If listeners want to learn more about your new book, Screen Wars, or about your work at Cross Screen Media, what’s the best way to contact you?

Michael Beach: Yeah, three websites. The first on the book would be screenwars.com. And that’s got a way to get ahold of me as the author, all the information about the book. We’ve got resources that you can download, there are 57 charts in the book. And we’ve got full-color versions that you can download as one file from our site. And then my personal site is michaelbeach.com which has a link to a podcast and newsletter and a bio about me. And then my day job at Cross Screen Media is at crossscreen.media.

Adrian Tennant: And we’ll include the links to those in the transcript for this episode. Michael, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Michael Beach: I’m grateful for your time. Thank you.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Michael Beach, the author of Screen Wars: Win the Battle for Attention with Convergent TV. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Big Eye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:01: Promo for Bigeye’s Retail Revolution 

00:59: Introduction to Convergent TV

03:24: Defining Convergent TV

04:07: Michael Beach’s Background

05:25: Services Offered by Cross Screen Media

07:10: Transition from Weekly Newsletter to Writing a Book

08:49: Evolution of the TV Industry from Broadcast to Streaming

11:00: Impact of Technological Advancements on Viewing Habits

13:12: Challenges Advertisers Face in Transitioning to Convergent TV Advertising

16:09: Promo for Data Storytelling in Marketing

17:08: Audience Measurement Challenges and Leveraging Data Analytics in TV Advertising

22:02: Applying Political Campaign Strategies to TV Advertising

24:28: Maximizing Reach and Frequency in Convergent TV Advertising

26:04: Predictions on the Future of Linear and Streaming TV

28:04: Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on TV Advertising

30:35: Contact Information for Michael Beach and Conclusion