AD COUNCIL: $2 BILLION AND COUNTING

Despite vastly increased competition, and turbulent technological changes, the Ad Council surpassed the $2 billion mark in donated media this year for its various PSA campaigns—the highest amount since it invented public service advertising 65 years ago.

While radio remained the largest supporter in fiscal 2007 (ended June 30), supplying half the media (just over $1 billion), television came on strong. Its support increased 48 percent to $465 million.

The Ad Council's biggest campaign in the year was theTVboss.org—an effort to inform parents about the V-chip and other means for controlling the kinds of  programming coming into the home via broadcast, cable or satellite TV.

The campaign was backed by $168.5 million in donated media—not surprising, given that the campaign’s sponsors included the TV and Hollywood lobbies and several major media companies.

Ad Council President Peggy Conlon may be hard pressed to set a new record in 2008. It’s an even numbered year, which means that inventory at many TV stations will be extremely tight as they try to capitalize on the political campaigning and the summer Olympics.

Plus, the Ad Council will have to compete with the pledges of the NAB and NCTA to set side hundreds of millions of dollars in TV time for PSA campaigns to inform viewers about the DTV transition and the February 2009 deadline for analog broadcasting.

Despite the challenges, Conlon is undaunted. She now has a platoon of executives cajoling media companies for time and space, and, like all advertisers, she is learning to reach consumers in new ways.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Contributing Editor Arthur Greenwald, Conlon shares her strategies for blending old and new media to better serve the public good.

An edited transcript follows:

As we can see from the current writers strike and other indicators, there’s a lot of concern about the health and viability of advertiser- supported media. Does this threaten the basic Ad Council strategic model?

The Ad Council has really evolved over the last 65 years to take advantage of what’s happening in the media landscape. So I would say it’s just the natural progression of us following the target audiences that we need to reach.

Are you finding it harder to get the messages on the air?

It gets increasingly difficult for a number of reasons. We’re in a very robust ad market right now, so in order for us to get meaningful inventory, the stations and networks have to thoughtfully carve out some room for us and we’ve been very lucky that they’ve done that. We’re also competing with tune-in advertising, which is getting more and more important.

Major advertisers have said that 2008 is going to be an especially tough year because it’s both an election year and an Olympics year. But the Ad Council must also compete with station group commitments to run PSAs about the digital transition.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. Those are exactly the three things that we’re concerned about and I suspect that it will be a year where we have to manage our expectations about the kind of support that we get in television.

So what then do you do for your clients in that situation? Do you plan to use other media?

Well, we don’t buy media. We advocate for donated media across the board. The good news is that we get terrific support from other media platforms that may not be as challenged as television in terms of available inventory. We get 50 percent of our support, over $1billion, from radio and I suspect that that will continue.

We can count on markets that aren’t caught up as much as others in the political advertising to continue supporting us. All of these broadcasters also have online platforms and we get terrific support there. Our support from the outdoor industry has just been growing and growing—we have over $120 million in outdoor support. We see very good support across the board and if we have to take a little bit of a hit in ’08 because of the market dynamics, then we’ll be right back in ’09 stronger than ever.

In some ways, the Ad Council is a microcosm of the entire ad industry. And while a robust ad market is good news for stations, there’s also concern that the reach of broadcast advertising is no longer as effective as it once was. When you look at media as a whole, has the Ad Council strategy started to shift to other media?

Just like paid advertisers, it really depends on the target audience. If you’re talking about a young male target, it’s harder to reach them on broadcast television then it once was. We go wherever the audiences are, not because we’re buying, but because the media companies recognize the importance of our messages and they bring us along. We help them decide which of our campaigns is most appropriate for their programming because we provide demographic information that shows which campaigns are most important to which target audience. We’ve gotten a lot better at partnering with media companies to make sure that they’re putting the right messages in the right programs.

A company like Viacom owns a variety of media. Does it donate that media in one fluid mix or are you dealing with separate entities within a big company like that?

We have to work with the various divisions. We do get upfront commitments from the top at Viacom, as we do from all of the major media companies, but then there’s an awful lot of collaboration that happens at the unit level. Our media outreach staff has grown to 19 people. Ten of those are full-time executives in the top 10 markets around the country so they’re calling on media companies at the local level, helping them to understand our campaigns and supporting the top down commitment that we have at the grassroots level. Then we have a staff that leverages those media company commitments here in New York, where we do the marketing. That’s everything from packaging the campaigns, promoting them with rich media push e-mails and other new technology, plus face-to-face sales meetings.

You’ve been at the Ad Council for over eight years. Was that structure in place when you arrived?

No, we only had about two or three people in the media department when I came here and it was pretty focused on just a direct-mail effort. We’ve turned it into a very strategic and very aggressive sales team.

So obviously that’s something that you’ve had to do because of the changing competitive media landscape?

Yes, it is. Absolutely. When I came here we were getting good support, but I recognized that inventory was tightening, that there was a lot of competition from other nonprofits that the Ad Council doesn’t represent. There were also network [branding] initiatives like NBC’s "The More You Know" or ABC’s "A Better Community." So we new that we needed to encourage media companies to embrace our campaigns whether it’s just running “in pattern” or incorporating our campaigns into their branded initiatives. And we do both.

You have also made some efforts to provide messages that can be co-branded that way by stations.

We really do encourage stations to make our campaigns their own, by tagging our PSAs with their own talent or logo at the end. We also provide radio groups with live announcer copy. We get a lot of support for that because they can make it a part of their programming experience.

Still, there’s an overall feeling that in general we don’t see PSAs on television as much as we used to. Is that an accurate perception?

It all depends on where you live. In New York or Los Angeles or even Chicago, I would say that that’s probably true. But we’re getting historically high support for our PSAs and it’s in markets where they’re not sold out all the time. The spot market buys generally start with those big markets and that’s where we get squeezed out. On the other hand, we are getting terrific support from cable systems and local cable networks and local cable operators.

What measures do you use to make sure that the media companies run those messages as promised?

We encode and subscribe to all the major monitoring systems. For example, we subscribe to Nielsen Sigma data and we know by station and by daypart, exactly which creative executions ran. We have an additional staff of four that collects all of the detections, analyzes them and publishes reports back to our campaigns. That’s how we know that on June 30, at the end of our fiscal year, we reached the $2 billion mark in donated media.

But at the Ad Council, it’s not enough to measure whether a spot’s running. You also must demonstrate whether it changed behavior. And you have to link the two together.

We do that on every single one of our campaigns because that’s the gold standard by which we judge our success. At the beginning of the work we field a benchmark study so we know which attitudes and behaviors we want to address. Then, nine to 12 months after that campaign runs, we re-field that study so that we know exactly how we’ve moved the needle on awareness, attitudes and behavior. Obviously we track donated media, but that’s just a means to the end goal, which is behavioral change. We also do weekly proprietary studies online so it’s not just a single point in time that we look at for how our message is resonating.

What are some of the campaigns that you have coming up?

We’re working on a campaign right now with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Of America to help educate people about returning vets. Of the 1.5 million Americans that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, a large percentage experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  We want to encourage them to seek out help. There’s also a component of that campaign that reaches out to friends and family to help them to recognize the signs of PSD and encourage the veteran to get help.

As they say on Law & Order, that topic is “ripped from the headlines” so it’s easy to understand the need. Is it more difficult in general to get cooperation from younger media executives who have grown up in the industry past the time when the public interest standard was considered an almost sacred trust?

I was worried about that when I first came here but I’ve discovered that it’s really not about the age or the [public service] experience. It comes down to the personality of the individual. There are some people who get it and there are some people who don’t. There are some people who understand that with great influence and privilege comes the responsibility to [run PSAs] for the good of the country. And that’s not really influenced by their age.

What plans do you have to use new media to persuade people to change their social behaviors?

Virtually all 50 of our campaigns have some kind of new media element, whether it’s Web banners and rich media that drive people to the Web site that we’ve built or campaigns where the primary creative approach is online. For example, our high school dropout prevention program is a social networking site, boostup.org. Some kids face incredible obstacles to graduating, everything from drugs to teen pregnancy. This campaign creates an environment where you can give kids a boost. We profile ten different at-risk kids from all over the country and you can go online and see the information about them and give them a boost on Facebook or MySpace.

There are all kinds of ways to reach out to these kids and you don’t have to be a peer to do it. Adults are encouraged to go in and give them a boost, but it’s all about cheering them on, giving them the resolve to overcome the obstacles that they have to graduate from high school.

Do you ever try out things like viral marketing and some of the other, more indirect approaches?

We do. We have our own channel on YouTube now and we’ve documented about 500,000 plays of our work in the past year. We encourage people to pass it along to friends. We’re getting into the business of developing “gadgets” or “widgets,” which are in those mini-applications that people can share with friends on their home page or social networking pages.

Are you also inviting viewers to create some of their own original PSAs or mash-ups from your existing spots?

We have a couple of campaigns that do that. We have a real fun campaign for kids that’s called Invent Now. It encourages kids to think originally and to invent new things. They can go online to inventnow.org and visit these little communities where they can post their inventions and have a lot of fun. We have a teen dating violence campaign that’s being done by R/GA which does the Nike work online. It's a well regarded interactive agency. Another campaign helps kids to find a mentor to help them know how to go to college because most kids just think you just go and sign up like in high school. They don’t understand that you have to apply and that your grades come into play. That’s going to have really exciting viral elements in the next phase of the campaign.

Are you changing over your production in the near future to high definition?

I have a team here at the Ad Council that’s heading up that initiative for us. I watch high def as often as I possibly can. It’s very exciting and I think that it would give us a competitive advantage if we were able to offer our PSAs in high def.

It sounds like the Ad Council continues shore up its traditional media strengths while strategically adapting to all the technological changes.

Well, we hope so. All suggestions very happily accepted.