In late 2023, I wrote a column suggesting the ESPN+ should try “eating their own dog food”. When I looked into the term’s history, it goes back a ways, but I’d heard it first when Fred Jacobs used it to refer to poor-sounding station streams. For ESPN+, I was complaining about their spot insertions with the same advertising spots over and over and some of them cut to get back to the game.
There was a recent MediaVillage piece by Surendiran Dhayala Rajan from DirecTV entitled “Putting the Viewer Front and Center of Dynamic Ad Insertion”. The piece asked, “So then how come, with nearly $60 billion spent in TV advertising, viewers are often bombarded with the same ads over and over again, leaving many to feel fed up with ‘advertising overload’?’ Rajan goes to make three suggestions involving integrating multiple ad servers, inventory management, and my favorite, frequency capping.
Apparently, the Disney/ESPN crew has not read Rajan’s piece. To aid them, I conducted a small qualitative study last Tuesday night during the ESPN+ version of the Washington Capitals/Calgary Flames game. I watch a fair number of Caps games on ESPN+ (I’m a former season ticket holder) and thought it would be interesting to track all the spots from the start of the game to the end. I included intermissions, but not the pregame show.
If you don’t have ESPN+, here’s a quick explanation. For any out-of-market game on the service, you can usually choose either team’s local feed, but you don’t see the local advertising. ESPN inserts different spots into the breaks. A few local spots leak through, for example, split screen spots that occasionally appear between faceoffs and live reads. Watching the Capitals local feed, I monitored 102 spots during the game, although as you’ll learn later, not all of them ran to conclusion.
The winner for most played individual commercial was BMW pitching BMW certified pre-owned vehicles. This single execution ran 12 times (!) during the game and intermissions. On a targeting basis, it was a good choice as I own two German vehicles and two CPOs. Certainly, 12 times during the game got the point across, perhaps a bit too much.
However, the top advertiser was Burger King. An ad for their duo and trio promotion ran nine times and another spot pitching melts was shown five times. Yes, 14 Burger King spots ran in one game presentation that lasted around two hours and 45 minutes. While averaging may not be the best measure in this case, Burger King appeared slightly more often than once every twelve minutes. By the latter ones, my girlfriend was singing “You Rule” along with the jingle, however, we both remarked that we hadn’t been to a Burger King in years.
Bet365 was also active with eight plays. It’s clear that I can get $150 in credit for a $5 bet, but put your money on my not having a Bet365 account any time soon.
Advertising from Verizon where people heave their old phones and a new iPhone 16 miraculously returns in the appropriate Verizon bag appeared seven times. One other Verizon spot was also run, so Verizon finished with eight insertions.
I mentioned earlier that spots get cut as well. The spot starts but the game feed resumes before the spot ends, so the ad is chopped before completion. This happened eight times, which is better than usual for ESPN+. Little Caesar’s, Good RX (their only spot in the game), an NFL Pro Bowl promo, Downy Unstoppables (their only spot), Sam’s Club, Crest, Sinex (their only spot), and Liberty Mutual all suffered this fate. Is this tracked? Do advertisers pay for spots that don’t complete?
I realize targeting is tricky but the final spot in the game was perhaps the most amusing one. It was for Secret explaining how you can use the product for “your pits and your bits” and gynecologists recommend doing this. That was news to me, and I’ll have to ask my gynecologist about it at my next appointment. Wait, I don’t have a gynecologist! And at that point, my girlfriend, who is not a big hockey fan but tolerates my love for the Caps, had her earbuds in while using her iPad and missed it. I’ll have to discuss this important new information with her very soon.
Does anyone at ESPN ever use the service? The interface was just redone and while my family’s Zenith black and white tube TV from the early ‘60s started up more quickly than getting ESPN+ to load, it seems as if no one in Bristol ever checks it out, or as Fred would say, they don’t eat their own dog food. Guys, you do a huge amount of dynamic ad insertion, so learn to do it right.
I don’t have expertise in programmatic advertising, but if anyone from Burger King or BMW sees this, please demand frequency capping. Maybe someone else could be enticed into a BMW CPO or is hungry for a Burger King melt. If you can’t cap the frequency, then produce four or five executions. American Express showed up five times in the game with only one repeat because there were four different executions.
Is this really the future of TV advertising? Too many spots (sound familiar?), the same ones over and over, combined with hit-or-miss targeting. Have we really advanced with all our digital wizardry? And radio gets less money because Burger King needs to run 14 spots in a single game? It looks like video advertising has become smarter but not wiser.
Let’s meet again next week.
