SMI launches in Canada today
By Greg O’Brien
MOST PEOPLE BUYING or selling advertising will likely tell you a rate card is merely the beginning of a conversation – and what clients actually pay is sometimes far different than the published price.
What ad buyers, and to a lesser extent, broadcasters, publishers and others, have long craved is a reliable way to figure out what ads truly cost in the market and beginning this month, they’ll be able to know that with Standard Media Index coming to Canada.
Since its launch 10 years ago in Australia, SMI has become a trusted source of advertising expenditure and pricing data and Canada is the fifth market the company has come to, after the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.
The company accesses real invoices from the world’s biggest buyers of media (across all platforms), anonymizes and organizes that very large dataset in order to create a clear, granular database where its clients can see what was spent to buy not just a 30-second spot in prime time, but on which show (for example, does Ultimate Tag on CTV or Seal Team on Global, both on at 9 p.m. tonight earn more, and from which produce segments?), and which of 35 product and service categories are making those buys.
When it comes to television, SMI data will identify which shows are properly valued, which are delivering real bang for the buck and therefore identify new opportunities for buyers, and also reveal which ones might be overvalued. However, the company tracks more than just TV.
SMI also tracks digital platforms, out-of-home, print, direct-to-home and radio ad spending, too. It is officially launching in Canada today and will capture nearly all of the national brand spending in the country thanks to its signed deals with the major agencies. “In Canada, our products will capture an incredible 94% of all national brand spend. Data collected through Standard Media Index’s relationship with all the major agency holding groups will provide much needed insight into the $7 billion dollars annually that makes up national Canadian advertising spend,” said CEO James Fennessy.
“Access to this data will allow clients to better and more accurately understand marketplace trends at a product category level, evaluate ROAS (return on ad spend) of major programming, and break out ad formats by media type to highlight the effectiveness of different kinds of placements,” added Fennessy. “Importantly, it’s untouched by human hands. They send us all the raw invoices and we do the work on cleaning, aggregating and harmonizing all of that data. No one is changing it, or bumping it up or anything along those lines,” he added in an interview with Cartt.ca.
“The value proposition is that we see where all those ad dollars go. We see how much goes to Rogers, how much goes to Corus, Bell, CBC. We report on revenue on top of their different platforms. Whether their digital platforms, or linear platforms, we report on programming, and how much revenue goes into different types of programming.”
“People want the truth.” – James Fennessy, SMI
With so few broadcasters in Canada, all of whom strictly guard how much they receive for ad spots, this level of transparency may well take some getting used to. In the U.S., however, the main media companies have all come on board. “NBC wants to have a look at Fox, CBS, and Disney, and because we’re fully syndicated, they can look at the other guy. They can look at revenue, they can look at the cost of buying media,” he explained. “It’s a very, very transparent dataset. It can be pretty scary for the publishers, particularly in Canada, because it’s been a pretty closed shop.”
However, with the large decline in ad spending during the Covid-19 crisis (ad spending in the U.S. fell dramatically during the crisis, according to its American data), Canadian broadcasters and buyers have so far been telling him they do need this data in order to better understand what’s happening in the whole ad market right now. “People want the truth,” Fennessy added.
In Canada, he told us in our interview, the total ad market was showing about 3% growth in the first two months of the year, but since the start of the pandemic, ad spending has dropped by 33%. Some segments were hit harder. Out-of-home ads are off by 54% and spending on Canadian radio has dipped 40% – and that’s just the national advertiser spending as SMI doesn’t have the same insight into local market spending purchased directly with broadcasters or Facebook or Google.
Fennessy said he’s happy to be coming to Canada at a time where advertising has been so impacted by the pandemic because its data “will allow media owners and brands to understand the impact Covid has had on the marketplace and determine the best where the best opportunities lie in this radically changed world.”
As for the agencies, they’re looking forward to being better informed. “Historically, Canada has been a very opaque media market, providing many challenges for agencies trying to get a complete understanding of the market dynamics,” said Brad Hugill, managing director, of Magna, in an SMI press release.
“The frequency and granularity of the ad intelligence data will be a welcome addition to the market and will address a major issue: a lack of transparency into the ebbs and flows of demand,” added Sebastian Rennie, chief investment officer, GroupM Canada.
