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SEASON 1 FINALE · The Media Odyssey

• TMO - Clip Ep. #2 === Evan Shapiro: [00:00:00] I don't like this quote because it's probably the funniest thing anyone said on the podcast all season, and I did not say it. Welcome to the second half of the last episode of the first season of the Media Odyssey Podcast. That as always, is Marion Ranchet. Marion Ranchet: And this is Evan Shapiro, who you are making this hard on everyone. This sentence, I don't know how you, yeah, I don't know how it came out right. Anyway. Evan Shapiro: I did though. Marion Ranchet: You did. You nailed it. Evan Shapiro: I landed that plane. Okay. Thank you. So we're on our last two favorite clips of the first season of the Media Odyssey Podcast. And let's start, as always, with beauty before age. You and your your [00:01:00] favorite, well, is it your favorite? This is a controversy that you started on the last episode. Marion Ranchet: Favorite because I love live episodes. We were at Stream TV, so that was really nice. Then the reason why I really like it is, but it challenged me, right? I had a very set opinion about that company and their endeavors in the ecosystem. And the guy was really good. Like he, so I'm warming up to his theory. Evan Shapiro: So, you've shots fired at Trade Desk, which is an interesting choice. Putting a target on not my back because you did it on an episode where, when I was on vacation with Alan Wolk, which actually still hurts my feelings that you cheated on the pod, but the two of you conspired or actually compared notes is more accurate, on the idea for Trade Desk launching their own OS. And this is what you said: Marion Ranchet: I think we had a very eventful 2024 and, last but not least, an announcement of a new player coming into [00:02:00] that space. And I wrote about it in Streaming Made Easy. And to me it made no sense. To me, this ecosystem is so fragmented, but, so let's pause maybe for a second on that big news from last year, which is The Trade Desk. First, what's your take on them coming into that ecosystem, especially from someone like you who's very acute to advertising and at technology. Alan Wolk: Yeah, it didn't make any sense to me either. And to be honest, I had yet to meet one person who had, who said yo, what a great idea. Like everybody is equally as baffled. Evan Shapiro: Yikes. Yikes. It made some sense. Marion Ranchet: I know. I, we went quite far on this one, but I think we were, well, both Alan and I were very passionate about that ecosystem. We know a lot about it. Evan Shapiro: I see. Marion Ranchet: And this was very much a left field market entry. But it's good. It's good. He is shaking things up. And what's fascinating is that then we went on stage with him, which was quite [00:03:00] funny actually. I did not expect to be on stage with this guy after I had said that, but it is what it is. And so Matthew Henick from The Trade Desk, who's in charge of the Ventura OS, then he almost convinced me, I think, and he said this: Matthew Henick: Look we think, based on our business and its strength, that we have a unique positioned to improve how the money flows through the CTV ecosystem. And we, before we made this commitment, we looked at basically every segment of it. So for OEMs and retailers, the people who are making and selling televisions, there's an incredibly hard standalone business. It's low margin, it's single digit margins, if not a loss leader. And what we've seen is that in order to make that sustainable, you need to move into an ads business. Or a content business at the very least. And then when you realize that you have two choices, really, you have to develop your own in-house OS, which to your point is not easy. And not only do you need to develop it, you need to maintain it and work with thousands of publishers and make sure that it's a robust, enjoyable user experience. [00:04:00] So you can build your own engineering team and build your own ads team, or you can mortgage your future to the big tech companies and let them handle it for you and maybe you get a bounty. And that's pretty much it. So we think there's a better way there. And we think there's a way for us to bring our expertise in software and our expertise in advertising to help OEMs have a better choice than those two. And then we look at advertisers, which are our core clients at The Trade Desk. And they wanna spend more in CTV, but they need access to better data, better transparency, to feel like they're getting more for their dollars. Publishers want to optimize the monetization of their media and are increasingly having to pay larger and larger tolls to the platform, either in the form of revenue shares or just inventory shares where they're handing over their inventory and their content that they paid for. And then that inventory is being represented by multiple partners in the ecosystem, so they're competing against the platforms they have. Also, the publishers are competing against the apps that are now owned by all the big OSs as [00:05:00] well. And so if you put all this together, it leads to a slightly in, depending on which integration it is a compromised user experience too, as it relates to discovery, as it relates to recommendations, as it relates to, as a user trusting a hundred percent of the pixels on your screen that they're there for you and trying to get you connected to the thing you wanted to watch when you turned on the television, or the thing that you'll discover as you go. And so we think we're one of the only partners who can look at that supply chain from beginning to end and provide a better option. Evan Shapiro: So did he convince you? Marion Ranchet: Yeah, I'm almost there, but yeah he brought me a little, he brought me a gift. So for those who are just listening in, it's a cup, a tin cup for my coffee that says, and Evan got one too, "It made no sense." So the guy, you need to be extra smart and super Evan Shapiro: Self-aware? Marion Ranchet: Yeah exactly. He is super self-aware. Evan Shapiro: He is. I'll say there, if you look at my coverage of Stream TV, which is where we recorded this and the whole pod is up [00:06:00] on our podcast obviously, but my coverage of it is on my Substack. I posted a bunch of photos from Stream TV and he photo bombed one in the most interesting Marion Ranchet: Oh, I saw that. That was awesome. Evan Shapiro: He's got the best sense of humor it and, but it sneaks up on you. Marion Ranchet: Yeah, he has a sense of humor. Evan Shapiro: It's very dry and very lurking in the background. And then he shows up with a tin cup with your quote on it. It was really great. It was very and very old school talk show by the way, too, like very like Johnny Carson meets David Letterman. Marion Ranchet: I agree. I agree. I'm seeing him again in September. He's coming to speak at IBC. He'll be on one of my panels. Evan Shapiro: At your event? Marion Ranchet: I'll not say it makes no sense again. Evan Shapiro: But what's your, what's the event you're doing at IBC? Marion Ranchet: So it's a panel within the IBC 2025 program. And so we're doing a panel on the living room essentially, who's trying to control the living room. And it's also gonna be, he's gonna attend my event on September 11th. Streaming Made Easy Live, so we'll get, people should come over, they'll get to chat with him, and and really see for themselves, [00:07:00] how good he is at pitching Ventura OS. Evan Shapiro: That event, Streaming Made Easy Live is gonna be amazing. So if you're in Amsterdam a day early, go. So my last clip is from my favorite episode of the season, which by the way, I have to apologize to all my friends who aren't in my favorite episode of the season, including Pedro Pina, who's the head of YouTube, EMEA, who we just dropped an episode with and that episode is absolutely crushing it, including Dhar Mann, one of the largest creators on the face of the Earth and one of the only scripted creators out there. That episode just dropped recently to Matt Risley who was at Channel 4, but he is no longer there, so fuck that guy. And that's a great episode. Marion Ranchet: He's not doing too bad. Evan Shapiro: Fuck that guy. He left the television biz. He left television all together. Marion Ranchet: Yeah. Evan Shapiro: He went be of all things. Marion Ranchet: He's going into the movie theater business, good for him. Evan Shapiro: The oldest school of entertainment ever. That guy, no, we wish him the best, but fuck him. Marion Ranchet: He was the first time [00:08:00] you should treat your first nicer. Evan Shapiro: He was our first guest. I'll never forget my first time. Or our first time, I guess it were, which is even grosser. So the, my favorite episode was with Paul McGrath from CBC and because it really wraps up everything we're talking about on this podcast all season long. This is a traditional media player who has to, has no choice but to transform themselves or they will become irrelevant. This is the CBC, the public broadcaster of the Canadian nation, Paul heads audience and other aspects of the CBC business and was charged with looking at digital distribution for the CBC in the user-centric era. They brought me up to Canada, we had a long conversation with all of the senior management there, and they came to a consensus to try something truly new, which was to treat digital video and social video as an equally important [00:09:00] distribution outlet to television and their owned and operated app. And a lot of the things that you thought might happen if you never looked at the data didn't. And a lot of surprising things did. And that's what this clip's about and what the episode's about: So how long have you been in this new mode that you would say leaning into YouTube as a distribution platform? Paul McGrath: It started in the spring of 2024. So we're just now anywhere closing off Evan Shapiro: It's been a year. Paul McGrath: Yeah, we're just about finishing our first 12 months of this bet and this new approach. Evan Shapiro: So let's take a look at the numbers now. When you look at the numbers right now, if I understand this correctly, 20% of your overall content across your 50 channels or so is long form, which you mean 20 minutes or 30 minutes or longer? Paul McGrath: 20 minutes. Evan Shapiro: 20 minutes or longer. But of the series and other titles that you've put out there, a lot of it is not just 20 minutes or longer, some of it's an hour or so, correct? Paul McGrath: Yeah, [00:10:00] that's right. Our documentary content, for instance, is often gonna be an hour, sometimes more. Some of the live stuff, if we're doing say a press conference or something from the news division, that will be, could be 40 minutes long, could be longer. So it, it's a mix. Evan Shapiro: So of the, of your overall content, and we're talking about probably thousands of hours here, about 20% of it is long form, 20 minutes or longer, but that 20% is 47%, almost half of total usage. Paul McGrath: That's right. Evan Shapiro: So it's punching more than two x above its weight. Paul McGrath: Totally. And I was actually surprised to see how large it was, given that, you know that other 80%, there's a lot of short content in there. Less than a minute, maybe less than two minutes and a lot of that content gets millions of views. So I was, I had an expectation that at least in aggregate that would account for a large amount of the total watch time. But I think there's a dynamic here that, especially with connected [00:11:00] TVs, especially with YouTube strategy around owning the living room, that long form content is overperforming on the platform right now. I didn't expect it to be to this extent, but it is. Evan Shapiro: Do you know how much Paul, how much of your usage is on connected television? Do you get a sense of that? Paul McGrath: At the start of the year, it was around 40%, and I think it's been creeping up month by month. So I think it's around 45, 50% right now. Of our watch time is coming from connected TV, and then after that it breaks down to like mobile and, desktop, mobile or computers and everything else. Evan Shapiro: And that's probably disproportionately the section that goes to long form. Yeah. This is the rest of the data. So you increase the overall amount of long form content across all those channels 55%. And then total watch time across all those channels went up 65%, so higher than that. But the channels that where you put, you concentrated the library content on [00:12:00] are the entertainment channels and the CBC channel. Is that my understanding correct there? Paul McGrath: Yeah, that's right. So, there's broadly, there's two large divisions at CBC. There's an entertainment division and there's the news division. The entertainment division has a number of channels, and those channels were publishing, in some cases, full episodes or compilations or long form content. Most of that catalog, though, that I was talking about, these 50 titles and these 500 hours of content was published just on that single CBC channel, which coincidentally is the one that grew the most in this graph, but also of many of our channels. So that's where a lot of the long form content was concentrated. I wouldn't say at the same time that it was just because of the full episode content that we saw growth across the board. We increased our publishing volume of shorts and long form and lives, I know a whole bunch of other things. So as a [00:13:00] result, everything went up pretty dramatically. But there definitely is a pattern here for creators, for media companies. If you have a library of long form content, you can take advantage of it and surf that wave of growth on YouTube towards long form content. Evan Shapiro: And crucially, what you found was this was a younger, discreet audience from what had watched these, this content in other areas on your app or on television. It was a younger, by many years than broadcast, and then even a significant amount over under streaming as well. Paul McGrath: What we did is we took the 50 titles that we had published on YouTube that were also previously published on our streaming service. And then we looked at all of those titles one by one and said from the date that it was published on YouTube, did it have an impact on engagement and consumption on our streaming service? And then we looked at that on a 30 day window and we looked at that [00:14:00] on a hundred day window. So take all the titles that we published on YouTube and from the date that they're all published, what was the impact on our streaming service? If the hypothesis is cannibalization, you would expect that when you publish on a different platform like YouTube, it would take away from the consumption you get on your streaming service. The net result that we found from studying that was the opposite, it actually increased the engagement on our streaming service from the date it was published on YouTube. Evan Shapiro: Wow. Paul McGrath: Not causality though. This is not causality Evan Shapiro: Coincide. They happen simultaneous, right? Paul McGrath: It happened simultaneously and what we think was happening was that we had windowed the content that we published on YouTube to align to premier dates on the streaming service, which therefore has a marketing campaign [00:15:00] around it. And therefore, we think what happened is we got a lift both on YouTube, as well as on the streaming service from publishing in both places. Evan Shapiro: So probably my favorite quote, so my favorite stat was the 20 minutes. My favorite quote, which I actually interrupt in this episode, so I apologize for that, is about cannibalization in the video and television era between traditional outlets and YouTube when you put the same content on both. And Paul very aptly describes it as the Lochness monster. Everybody talks about it, but no one's ever seen it. And that to me, his statistical answer to that conundrum that's happening inside every public media company that I've met with over the last couple of years. And his ability to prove it incorrect with his own many platforms to me personifies the fear of finding out and the reason to get over it. And that's why [00:16:00] it's my favorite episode. Marion Ranchet: I have to say I have, I love that episode too, but yeah, we need a different one, so that's okay. I'll give it to you. I'll give it to you. But Paul is my friend more than yours. He speaks French. Evan Shapiro: That's true. Marion Ranchet: Okay. It's hard to choose a favorite quote, but because you mentioned metaphor with the Lochness and Paul, I would say my favorite was with LG during MIP London. And it's the avocado metaphor with Ryan from LG ads. Ryan Afsha: 2025, I think is the most exciting year for Europe. I think, the US couple, two, three years ahead of Europe in terms of fast adoption. There's this kind of really cool poster art which helps me describe this, which is about avocados. You may have seen it, which is like: Not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet, eat me now, too late. We're in the ripe "eat me now" stage of FAST both from a content perspective and an advertiser's perspective. So we're seeing content owners really leaning to FAST where maybe they were a bit hesitant. Are they gonna put their best content out? Now, there's more platforms, there's no new OSs. So they are really looking at other content to put out there. For an advertising perspective, they were waiting: where's the scale? Does the ad funded model work? Is there good measurement targeting capabilities? That's all in place, everything's aligned to be this kind of super right "Eat me now" phase. So I would say, yeah, that this is the most exciting year for CTV and FAST from an advertising perspective. Marion Ranchet: Love it. I'm gonna steal this avocado line. Evan Shapiro: I don't like this quote because it's probably the funniest thing anyone said on the podcast all season and I did not say it. Marion Ranchet: It was very funny. And actually now I think that's gonna, that's gonna stick because he says that after that came out, people were like the avocado. Yeah, you're the avocado guy. So I think it's, Evan Shapiro: That's awesome. Marion Ranchet: It's very funny. But so again, and I think that shows very well what we're trying to do here. It's about building community, building conversation and having fun. So I think that's, yeah. Evan Shapiro: That's it. It's been great working with you. I, [00:18:00] we were friends before we started this, but I'm really glad we decided to do this. It's been terrific working with you. It's only been educational and fun the whole time. Thank you so much for being such a great partner. Marion Ranchet: Yeah, thank you too. And we gotta thank our partners because this podcast wouldn't be possible without them. And so we've been working with folks at Edgy Ads, Evan Shapiro: Spectrum Reach, Marion Ranchet: Swipe Finder, Evan Shapiro: Merzigo, Marion Ranchet: Bedrock Streaming, Evan Shapiro: Bango, Marion Ranchet: and Film Hub. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Evan Shapiro: Thank you very much. Thank you. Marion Ranchet: I wanna thank the team, right? Because we have a team helping us do that. Evan Shapiro: We do? Marion Ranchet: Yeah, we do. Yeah. We wanna pretend Evan Shapiro: I've never really met them. Marion Ranchet: You're Superman and I'm Wonder Woman, whatever, but no, we do have an amazing team, behind. So, Paul, Jesse, Taylor, Katerina, Jamie, Jill, Evan Shapiro: Dariyah, Marion Ranchet: Sophie, Daphne on my team. It takes a village to do this thing. This was intense. 30 episode, one a week, without a miss. Evan Shapiro: I'm really proud. [00:19:00] Marion Ranchet: It's demanding. Evan Shapiro: I'm really proud of the season, so thank you very much. But we are not done by any stretch. Please go back and listen to any of the episodes from season one that you may have missed, but season two has an amazing lineup already with some spectacular guests with great case studies to share with you. Live episodes at MIPCOM and Stream TV Europe, and some fun new formats. We're gonna play around with the show and give you some new things to think about in season two, so please listen to the back episodes, subscribe, come back for season two. That is the inimitable Marion Ranchet, whose newsletter you should read. It's Streaming Made Easy on Substack. Marion Ranchet: And that is Evan Shapiro, the one and only, and his newsletter Media War and Peace on Substack. Evan Shapiro: Thanks so much for listening or watching or whatever you do for season one. Please come back for season two. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much. Marion Ranchet: Have a lovely summer.