Summary:

Few leaders in our industry have the breadth of Bryon Schafer who has led research at organizations across the TV value chain: in advertising, broadcasting, distribution, platforms and even investment. Bryon shares fascinating insights about new ad models, the future and the new TV landscape.

Transcript:

Duane: Legends of Media Research is a podcast series featuring interviews with the media industry’s leading researchers, where we go behind the scenes, sharing stories from their greatest achievements and challenges. Brought to you by MediaScience, the leader in media and advertising innovation research.

Stay tuned at the end of the podcast for more information about mediaScience, but for now, I’m your host, MediaScience CEO, Dr. Duane Varan.

Welcome to Legends of Media Research. We’ve got a great show for you today. Today we’re interviewing Bryon Schafer, who’s SVP of research at Vevo, who dominates the music video category.

Bryon’s call to fame is the true breadth of experience he has across the entire TV value chain. He’s worked on the advertiser side, the network side, and distribution, the platform side, the investor side. I mean, Bryon brings a breadth of experience to the party that is truly unique in our industry. So he is gonna be sharing tons of great insights with us today.

Bryon, welcome to Legends of Media Research.

Bryon: Thank you. It’s great to be here, Duane. I really appreciate the time.

Duane: So Bryon, you had a very unusual start in the industry. I think people don’t know this about you, but your degree was actually in Cultural Anthropology and then your start in the industry. It was actually – your first job was actually in banking.

So you went from Cultural Anthropology to banking and then to advertising. Very unusual start. [laughs] Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you got started in the industry.

Bryon: For sure. So when I was in college, and it was our sophomore year when we were deciding what we wanted to major in and pursue academically, I was really drawn to the social sciences and, namely, Cultural Anthropology.

I really loved reading ethnographies and had a really great advisor who would send us to different local establishments to pull together, at the time, cultural insights around what was happening at that particular restaurant or bar or business in the town that I was going to university, and just really felt that there was something about the social sciences that intrigued me, but the ability to apply that academic background in business functions…

I started to see more as I pursued more gratifying career opportunities out of college. I wanted to be in New York City more than anything, and so I took the opportunity that would best benefit me in underwriting, rent, paying back student loans, things like that, and that was in banking. But I quickly realized after a [00:03:00] few months that, culturally, I was looking for something a bit more gratifying in terms of the people I worked with, the mission we were on in terms of servicing our clients and found at Ogilvy and Mather a great boss and leader who…

As I was interviewing, I realized that she had gone to the same university that I did. So I made a connection and found that, through that relatability to be –or just a really great first experience to me in a more creative industry. So I had looked around in advertising agencies, publishing houses, things like that. And when I saw it, I knew it was a great opportunity for me and things took off from there.

 

Duane: And in fact a lot of the econometric modeling that you were doing in banking, you were then able to apply to your new role in advertising.

Bryon: There were a lot of similarities and approaches to modeling at the time, merger models on one end, but on the other end, ROI modeling.

I had some adjacent exposure to some econometrics that were happening at Ogilvy at the time and was able to really be drawn into some of the more quantitative practices at media agencies at the time but also tools development. And when my boss actually exited to go to Cara, they were able to allow me more and more exposure to opportunities around modeling, but also tools development.

We were working at the time with some of the first fixed fusions, taking meals in television ratings and marrying them with consumer survey data so you could get a rating for Lubriderm users, for example, or high blood pressure, medication consumers, for example. And that to me was just a really exciting time being able to help create stories for planners around the consumer that afforded them to put together smarter campaigns for our clients.

Duane: Now when you and I began collaborating, it was truly prehistoric times in terms of the new TV landscape. It was back first in 2003. At the time you were Rick Mandler’s lieutenant, you know, Rick Mandler, another legend at ABC.

And, you know, together you guys were pioneering this idea of ‘Enhanced TV’, just for the benefit of the audience, to give you a little bit of background around 2003, there weren’t a lot of of new TV landscape ideas around or possibilities. There was of course TiVo, there was Wink. I think Wink may have even been on its last legs by then. Microsoft TV had a little bit, but again, that never really kind of like took off properly. And then there was Enhanced TV. And when you [00:06:00] look at Enhanced TV with the benefit of hindsight, there are things that Enhanced TV did in 2003 that today are being rolled out as new models, [laughs] new ad models.

And the way that Enhanced TV worked, again, for everybody’s benefit, is that the internet, which by the way back then was not broadband. I mean, it was a thin internet service. I mean, you know, it was, very, very, very thin in fact. And so you had this functionality that was available over the internet that you could simultaneously use while you were watching broadcast television. And so they were designed as, kind of like, as a two screen experience. Pick up the lead from here and tell us about Enhanced TV and what you were doing at ABC at that time.

Bryon: Yeah, that’s great. So I had an opportunity to join ABC Television in sort of a relatively new area within the research team that was focused on bringing newer methods and approaches to support the sales team, specifically, at the beginning of that, and was hired by someone who had academic methodological research background and she helped me really get broad exposure to a wide range of internal clients, namely.

And Rick Mandler, as you mentioned, was one of them. There’s another alum from where I went to school. There was like an instant connection where I was like “this guy’s pretty cool. I want to do some, some work with him”. And Rick at the time was building this Enhanced TV Division, which was focused on two screen interactivity, if you will.

So Enhanced TV at the time was, for example, during Monday night football, you could watch Monday night football on its regular linear telecasts, and at the same time you could have your computer there interacting with things that were happening with the game. So trivia, for example, about what was happening for the game and what we were able to do [00:08:00] through the design of experiments and working with yourself, for example, be able to draw the parallels between people engaging with the content and this sort of interactivity and the relative stickiness or resonance of the messaging that was coming across at that time. Being able to show the value of advertising that took place in this context.

And similarly you are seeing that spoken about in the media landscape today with regards to second screening, people interacting with their mobile phones while watching television. Very similar. And you know, you mentioned some other applications there that I believe existed in some of the context around the DVR.

We were doing a lot of other research at the time that was just super interesting to me with a background in anthropology, for example, getting to work with Artie on an ethnography around DVR adoption and impact. And to really approach it from a more of an academic qualitative background to draw some themes out that would resurface and reiterate themselves, across a lot of different touchpoints in my career.

Convenience and control, or example, being the main drivers of functionality of the DVR. Being able to deliver on the promise of the VHS in a lot of ways because it was easy to use it, being able to find penetration through cable distribution in recognizing that standalone TiVos were never gonna get three and a half percent penetration on its own because it’s hard for consumers to wrap their heads around going to a Best Buy and buying a piece of hardware and running a landline in their current home setup, for example.

And then also things like product integration at the time was taking off before being able to recoup some of the lost revenue opportunities that the DVR was going to negatively impact the advertising business. If we were to put an ex Nissan Xterra in Desperate Housewives, what was the resonance of that sort of integration relative to a 32nd spot? Or if they were to work together and so was just really able to use a variety of different methods, design of experiments to help quantify advertising value at that time.

Really got to get a broad exposure to a wide range of clients focused on different things, but also different areas that are now sign have significantly impacted our business in the landscape 20 years later.

Duane: Again, with the benefit of hindsight, when you look back, it was such a powerful premonition of the future.

I mean, you know, it was working with some pretty serious technological constraints in terms of what you realistically could do with, you know, with the thin bandwidth that was available. But really with the benefit of hindsight, it’s just remarkable how many ideas were kind of like first pioneered in that Enhanced TV era.

Bryon: It is really remarkable and I look back at some of these things that I was fortunate enough to be able to be exposed to and work on and kind of feel in a lot of ways, like [00:11:00] Forrest Gump being in all these really important moments of history with regards to media research. There were a lot of things that we were working on at the time that we knew were gonna be really significant. Opportunities and challenges for the landscape over the next couple decades.

[music]

Duane: Now, you mentioned kind of like being at the right place at the right time. I think that perfectly describes your tenure at Hulu. I mean, you landed at Hulu at such an interesting time and, you know, the dynamic –I mean, again, you know, we collaborated a lot on that role as well. And I remember walking in Hulu, and it was just such an exciting –It was electric, you know, there was a revolution that was brewing.

And Bryon, you were on the ground floor in the midst of that revolution. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what it was like for you going from the world of broadcast to the world of Hulu.

[laughs]

Bryon: For sure. So, I had actually spent a couple years having relocated out to the West Coast and working for Warner Brothers on the home entertainment side, where I had the great fortune of just working in high volume, primary research on sort of the –in support of product management there.

So at the time, the DVD business was peaking, but we are exploring ‘electronic sellthrough’, which now is a fancy way of saying ‘downloading and watching movies’, but also just being able to do a lot of work that would lend itself well to SVOD configuration research over the next 10 years.

Namely, a lot of choice modeling, a lot of understanding where pricing and packaging and the depth and breadth of the content you wanna distribute in charge for, and how and when, and windowing that should take place. And so through that high volume, and I mean high volume at the time, Warner’s –and there are other Warner’s areas of the studio plus new line cinemas.

We were releasing 30 films plus a year, so I was doing on a near weekly basis what a lot of researchers at other companies, probably, that have a new product launch once a year maybe, at a steady quick pace and really actually also missed a lot of the advertising and audience measurement aspects of that role.

We used to work with the media team to understand best times to fly and wait where placements went in support of the releases of these features. But when the opportunity to join Hulu at the ground floor came up, I left the opportunity and really reached out and pitched and sold myself as having the benefits of multiple perspectives in working at the television in sport of sales side of the equation, but also the product management side of it.

And was really able to, again, get broad exposure within Hulu a lot of different things we were working on. If it was our ad model at the time, we were coming out with CPMs that were XX-the most expensive CPMs in market that people had seen that a broadcast prime.

And our model at the time was sort of half the ad load at TV at twice the price. And so there was a lot of work there to quantify the value of that nventory and experience for advertisers who were not used to that level of pricing. So that lent itself well to a ton of advertising effectiveness research at the time in support of helping build that business and in also just making it easy for people who were being exposed to digitally distributed video to be able to speak the language of television and marketing as they had understood it, to be able to make it feel like something that they were accustomed to, even though in many ways it was very different.

Duane: But culturally, what was the experience like? You arrived in this organization. That was like a little bit of a revolution brewing.

[laughs]

Bryon: Yeah. It was very different and much more in line with what I had always hoped. A work experience would be like, very casual and colloquial, very fast paced. Minimal meetings. We prided ourselves on being a flat organization that was meritocratic in nature but also just everybody focused on the mission at hand.

And that was to not only help fundamentally change how people found and enjoyed television and movies, but at the same time being able to steer an industry through a really challenging time in terms of how people were gonna be finding and consuming content. Now, culturally, I’d also add that it was great to be able to start to wear even more hats, that in a particular department, in a corporation, you might not be exposed to.

So things like organizational design, which did the team look like, being able to walk across the floor and talk to an engineer instead of having to set up a meeting next Wednesday and talk about it for 30 minutes. Being able to solve problems quickly, like, that to me became a really, really attractive proposition in terms of how I wanted to spend my day.

And you would leave each day exhausted because of the many things you were able to accomplish because of that sort of culture.

Duane: It was also very much like a tech startup. You were disruptive. You had a very clear constituency, you know, at the time, which was the viewer and empowering the viewer. I mean, it was a completely new paradigm for television.

Bryon: Absolutely. In fact, that was the first time that I had seen a level of focus and commitment to user experiences, and that the consumer had not had its day in court, so to speak, with regards to being able to decide when they wanted to watch something that they wanted to watch, or not having to experience a hundred popup advertisements, a really large commercial ad load.

Which as we know, we found to be a major deterrent if people would come back and use a service through the research we’ve done over the years. But it was just really rewarding in that sense to be able to be really focused on the consumer as well as our other constituents, they being the advertisers, the content distributors and programmers.

Duane:I know also from some of the work that we did that, you know, you guys were really first to advocate and put forward the whole idea of limited interruption. Which again, now it has become the norm. There’s a lot of growing expectation in the market for it, limited interruption [00:18:00] outbreaks, but you guys really pioneered that, and again, way, way ahead of its time, kind of so to speak.

Bryon: Yeah, it was really interesting in that we found that one of the better, if not few incentives we could offer consumers was fewer interruptions or fewer breaks, or to actually engage them in conversations that they weren’t used to having that, as byproducts, were really beneficial for us.

So to ask someone, ‘is this ad relevant to you?’ in the context of: they’re watching an ad and they see a little question pop up to them, you’re actually cognitively engaging them. ‘Is this ad relative to you?’, so they’re actually thinking about it and they’re giving you a little bit of highly scalable, very binary data back in exchange for that.

So even with very low or modest response rates, fractions of a percent, if you will, we were able to get relatively large data sets that could in turn inform more relevant advertisement. Also, giving them choice, for example, with our ad selector model at the time, they could choose which ad they wanted to see. It was another example of ‘here we are engaging them in something and they’re making a choice’.

Started to talk about things being self addressable at the time. That’s another way to get them engaged in something, but also telling you what they like and in that context, telling you two other things that they like less. So the data you’re getting back in exchange for that, that conversation, if you will, is very, very valuable.

Duane:You must look back at your time at Hulu with some nostalgia. What stands out most for you about that time?

Bryon: One of the things that was really fun for me was seeing that Hulu free TV on the internet model evolve into what it is today, long after I’ve left, has been really exciting. You saw this opportunity to distribute more broadly.

In the context where you were getting them to subscribe for something, and this was at the time where people didn’t pay for things on the internet and cut to now where it’s so frictionless to be able to transact for things in terms of commerce on the internet. It was one of the first times I had seen ‘no one’s gonna pay for this’ evolve into ‘hey, we just crushed our 1 million subscriber threshold’.

I feel like that was proof positive that we were onto something as an industry. Is that yes, people are willing to pay for it, but it has to be markedly better and solving for a problem. People pirate content because it wasn’t accessible to them more than anything. And so the more easily you made it to consume and find, the more it would be consumed.

It wasn’t anything. And our CEO at the time you speak to: ‘we’re not selling air, but if we make this content more available, they will consume more of it’. And we’ve seen that hold true in many other progressions of content distribution over the last 20 years, 15 years.

Duane:You know, we don’t wanna paint the impression that everything went to plan.

I remember one of the challenges that you faced at Hulu was Hulu’s international expansion. I think at the time there was a major venture expanding into Japan. It’s really been surprising in a way, looking with the benefit of hindsight that you didn’t have Hulu grow globally the way say Netflix grew globally.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what some of the challenges were that you were facing in that kind of global expansion side of what you were attempting at the time?

Bryon: Yeah. We actually had a very successful launch of a subscription of SVOD service in Japan, that I was fortunate to get to do work on from a research standpoint, qualitative and quantitative.

Watching focus groups in the middle of the night from here in California, taking place in Japan, but at the same time working through our pricing and content bundling in terms of what are those, in breadth and depth of content. To them, that was the most interesting that we could package. That was a wonderful experience and we considered that a success.

Launching that business, that was one of the few places where we were offered the opportunity to launch. I had another project where I got to work on ‘what should our service look like in India?’, and so running a large study in five different dialects in India looking at forecasting from a universe reduction standpoint, starting off with a billion people [Duane laughs] and working through comfort at that time, transacting on credit cards and what the piracy rate was there and being able to explain what the service was and wasn’t to constituents to get down at.

Even at that time, what felt like a relatively modest number, but since then would have probably grown exponentially. And so while that was a bit of a disappointment in not being able to launch a service in India, just to be able to work through such a complicated [00:23:00] project from all the breadth of cultural diversity in India was very, very rewarding.

It gave me another experience, if you will, to broaden my understanding of market research and particularly, international territories.

Duane: See, that cultural anthropology degree came in handy after all [laughs]

Bryon: It continues to paint evidence.

Duane: What went wrong though? I mean, again, it’s such a curiosity here, right?

I mean, you know, Netflix is everywhere, but Hulu, it had that attempt. It had that stab in Japan, you know, somehow that fell through and the whole international expansion side of it never really played out.

Bryon: You know, between Hulu, my time at Otter Media and now at Vevo, this is my third joint venture.

And sometimes with joint ventures, you know, my sense is that the governance at the time wasn’t overly enthusiastic about us launching in places where they individually had respected businesses at the time. Hulu was a venture with NBC and Fox, and then Disney came on. And so you had three different corporations with different perspectives about how the world should work, and that was a challenge for what direction the business should ultimately take.

[music]

Duane: So then you had a little bit of a sink going back to Warner, and then after that your career takes another really major turn in terms of direction, and you go on the investor side of the equation. [laughs] How did that happen?.

Bryon: I was working at Warner’s in an administrative role and started talking to some of my friends from Hulu who were working closely with the team at the churning group in AT&T with this new venture called Otter Media, Otter being O-T-T-ERS, and that they recognized that the video space was going to continue to grow, and they wanted to invest of it and take advantage of that rising tide.

And so with a 500 million dollar fund, they were investing in a portfolio of companies that were doing smart things in the space, if you will. So my role in coming aboard there was at the sort of corporate Otter level, but I was deployed into the holdings to work on a wide range of things ranging from organizational design in terms of what the analytics infrastructure could look like in these respective places.

Some of them were SVOD services. For example, Crunchyroll is a Japanese anime subscription service that was acquired by The Chernin Group and ultimately grew to be a couple million paying subscribers.

And when we looked at that service and we wanted to understand how to continue to grow that, what are some of the adjacencies to Japanese anime fans? So we can start to broaden the coverage potential of a service like that. So looking at content that appeals to [00:26:00] we call like ‘geek gamer, fanboy nerd culture’ that had strong adjacencies to Japanese animation and ultimately coming up with a new bundle of content that could service that constituency in a broader capacity.

Another company at the time, Fullscreen, was very focused on influencers and YouTubers and content marketing and being able to leverage the inertia they had through a lot of personalities that had built a really strong audience into launching another subscription video service.

So I got to work on a lot of launches of subscription video over the course of what, five, six years probably. And that gave me just all the more perspective around the value of IP and content, for example, relative to content marketing or advertising and what was important to marketers at the time, which continues to evolve.

So that was a really exciting opportunity for me personally, getting to work on a range of different assets, if you will, for the automedia team. And in parallel to that, the AT&T team was working to think about ‘what does scale look like in this new world? How big do we have to be? How much content do we need?’

And through this venture, they really saw that they were gonna need a lot more. And so that ultimately led to the Time Warner acquisition, which was a really exciting time for me to be there because I was just getting exposed, not just in the day to day projects we were working on, but to the larger development of a corporate strategy around what the future will look like in terms of who succeeds in this space and the breadth and depth of their libraries that need to really support a strong consumer proposition for the long term.

Duane: So you went from a more traditional broadcasting background to this new venture, I mean, a very well funded new venture, but a new landscape altogether.

What was so different about the world you discovered at Otter?

Bryon: One of the things that was exciting about Otter was that we were really focused on not just understanding how to service consumers in terms of giving them the content they want and the context that they’re expecting with the changing landscape and the uptake of places like YouTube and paid content through digital platforms, but also this notion of servicing fans.

And there’s this notion of, you know, you can be broad and have something for everyone, but when you’re highly targeted, you’re everything to someone. And the idea that Japanese anime could be everything to but a relatively small constituency. Yes, millions of people, but we’re not talking about sports or music where half or more of the population listens to or watches on the regular. We’re talking about things that people are extremely passionate about.

And at Otter, the idea was to turn over every stone as to where can we find these constituencies of deep, deep passion to really shore up a deep and rich content library that had a lot of coverage potential with these pockets of deep, deep fanship where we could serve or, in this case, super serve them with not just content, but a bigger picture with regards to experiences.

So can you get them closer to the action, sort of that velvet rope scenario at live events? Or was there an opportunity for well curated merchandise and being able to create, in a very corporate speak, a stronger ARPU opportunity and driving commerce and more revenue therefore.

But also the way that it could be packaged through this lens of fanship really helps manage major challenges in subscription. Namely churn. And so when you recognize the importance of a lot of these other things that companies are doing in servicing consumers, a lot of it comes down to how do we mitigate the churn?

So if you’re Netflix and you’re at 50 million subscribers years ago, they’re still living in a world where, for every consumer that comes in, a half of one is coming out. So dealing with 50 to 60 plus percent annual churn rates, even at scale, is a challenge that exists today in subscription video because you make it easy for them to cancel.

You make it easy for them to understand when a show’s gonna be on or over. And so that was a really rewarding experience, just getting the depth of understanding through these different holdings, and then also at the more strategic level of where they need to be to succeed with a large service for the long term.

Duane: And of course, the other side of fandom, and again, this goes back to research that we collaborated on many, many moons ago, but we know, consistently we see that fans respond to ads very differently. That ad impact is significantly higher among fans than it is amongst the rest of the population.

And that goes back to work we did together with Desperate Housewives way back when. [laughs]

Bryon: Absolutely. The vocal minority, if you will. And we still see that today in healthy and less healthy places on the internet. To be able to have that understanding and see where they fit in in the value equation.

And when you think about the laws of volume distribution, to have a service that say has 20 million users, you really have 2 million users that represent 75% of the volume. And everyone else is very light user. And that’s sort of how that 80/20 rule has manifested in media over the past several decades.

And so the path to scale is really, really important. We say ‘what is meaningful scale?’ We’re talking about a world where, on a monthly basis, you’re reaching a hundred million plus recognizing that that heartbeat is but 10% of that user base.

Duane: It’s a great point. We’ve talked in previous episodes about the Pareto principle in a different context.

You know, in terms of the market reach context and why reaching light buyers is so critical. But as you say, when it comes to things like churn and building your distribution, the Pareto principle plays a really critical role because the people that you’re really gonna build your service on are gonna be those core users ultimately.

Bryon: That’s right, that’s right.

Duane:Also, at your time at Otter Media, of course, because of the focus of a lot of the content, you know, the youth audience was a really big focus for where a lot of your startups, I guess, were applying their craft and their energy. So you got a lot of exposure in that time period as well to youth culture.

Bryon: Yeah, absolutely. And largely in the context of YouTube at the time, which was a very fascinating environment in that we saw sort of handover fist that generation over generation, there was a path towards different things that younger generations were watching and accessing and consuming. And a lot of the things we learn about YouTube at that time we see happening today with TikTok, for example.

So the ability to watch something that’s not being programmed on linear television, DIY videos, makeup tutorials, a wide range of different types of content that had never any sort of exposure in the traditional television business, were driving audiences that dwarf them in many ways.

And so to understand when you’re talking about youth culture, that there’s a very brief window of deep, deep relevancy that having connections to a YouTuber has and the resonance that those conversations have with them is extremely meaningful, particularly relative to a 32nd spot in a broad based television show, for example.

And so that was a really attractive proposition to a lot of marketers who wanted to be able to leverage those relationships. The challenge, of course, is finding scalable inventory and content marketing at that time was really interesting because it was an opportunity to try to push the envelope of what’s possible for advertising beyond the 32nd spot, but also just finding out the challenges with those sorts of models as well.

To have a very challenging economics behind meeting hundreds and hundreds of people to make custom content that ultimately would be viewed by tens of thousands of people versus tens of millions in a lot of ways is a really deep insight around that type of business that enabled investors like The Chernin Group and AT&T to understand the benefits, but also the limitations of those sorts of businesses.

[music]

Duane: So then you made your final transition in our story today at least, to Vevo, and such an interesting transition for you. You came in at a very interesting time in terms of how Vevo’s content was being distributed. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your transition into Vevo.

Bryon: So I began talking to some ex Hulu colleagues who were at Vevo while Time Warner and Otter Media were being acquired by AT&T. And I also recognized that the landscape was about to enter a period of distress. Things were consolidating. The world was about to get much smaller for the Time Warner’s or Disney’s, for example, and recognizing the importance of going to direct to consumer, but also this Renaissance and how the content would be windowed and distributed.

And in talking with my friends and now colleagues at Vevo… Vevo had this really interesting proposition where they generally represented the category of music videos in the market. And music videos are a lot like sports in that if you ask consumers what types of content they love and want more of, music and sports have a tendency to float to the top. Current TV shows and movies and Spanish language content are up there too, but when you look at the sort of last bastions of scale in the content space, those are your five places, more or less.

And the music labels at the time we’re distributing their music videos on YouTube, and that’s it. And they were being successful in the revenue that they were generating, but at the time it was largely computer and mobile driven, and we knew that we were on the preface of the connected television marketplace starting to take off.

And in recognizing with the music labels that a broader distribution strategy not only reinforces the business that’s been established with YouTube, you’re actually going to expand your audience, making it easier for people to find and enjoy music videos and take advantage of the fact that half the population each month doesn’t watch music videos on YouTube.

So there’s upside. And there’s upside, not just in larger audience and more revenue, but there’s a larger upside in just building a defensible moat around the Vevo proposition, which strengths are really rooted in the aggregate of the IP between Sony Music and Universal Music Group. And so I joined there a little over three and a half years ago, and we focused a year on our CTV strategy and then deploying the connected television partnerships in the market with all the leaders who were supporting ad supported distribution at that time.

And so being able to stand up services on Apple or Pluto or Amazon, etc. That allowed for us to reach more people, have people be able to turn on their connected TVs, and see in a lot of ways more passively consumed opportunities but with sort of self addressable relevance in a lot of ways, you can turn on and see an EPG that’s cashed linear experience today that feels like old school TV in a lot of ways, but it’s powered by the internet, and so we’re able to deploy data and more contextual filters to make things more and more relevant, not just from a programming standpoint where my past viewing behavior can inform what you should recommend to me, but also what ad experiences I’m gonna be more or less open to.

And so the past few years at Vevo have been extremely rewarding in being able to help the market move in a world where their inventories rapidly eroding in the places that they’ve historically found it to exploring these new opportunities and being able to make fair comparison and get them from A to B in a relatively easy way. And that’s a lot of what we did at Hulu, is make it easy for people to plan and buy media in these new places that they traditionally haven’t been accustomed to. So that’s been a lot of fun.

Duane: And since you joined Vevo, a lot of your focus was really on finding and building new distribution models for music videos..

Bryon: That’s right. One of the things we recognized was that with such a highly fragmented ecosystem, there was a lot of opportunity for the business to recognize any place with some sort of minimal threshold for coverage should be entertained as an end point to touch a consumer.
And so we’ve left this space over the last 10 years where we’re used to a show or a network reaching millions of people a night, and now we’ve transitioned to a place where we’ve got a multitude of services, call them a dozen, that are reaching hundreds of thousands a day.

And so it’s really important to be able to find that strength of aggregation, that power in numbers that come through a broad distribution strategy. And that also makes you a really important measurement partner because you’re able to understand a lot of the nuance that might be happening on one particular platform relative to another.

We see differences in taste, for example, where some genres on one service are the clear leaders in how people wanna tune in for that particular genre and watch eighties music videos on that service, but on another service, for example, the seventies are the number one service and tastes differ, and these platforms in a lot of ways service different constituencies.

And so to be able to leverage that is very, very powerful. Not just from a more scale, more reach, the things that are important to the media buyer planner, but also just more insight with regards to taste, nuance, placements for media folks, things of that nature, which I think are really powerful and useful today when people are trying to find more relevant avenues and pockets to have meaningful and authentic conversations with consumers.

Duane: And of course for Vevo, those conversations are truly global in scope. I mean, you guys aren’t limited to the US market. You distribute worldwide. You’re global player.

Bryon: It is global. So we reach about 150 million people a day around the world, and we are sold in about 55 markets that Vevo represents today.

And so we’ve been growing a lot over the past couple years. Of course, domestic. But also have strong businesses in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Oceania territories. If you think about where the landscape has gone in the US over the past two years, a lot of those other markets are beginning to experience a lot of those same things.

So we’ve been able to be ahead of the situation as they’re ready to find more inventory, more supply in the market outside of where they traditionally have been able to find it, and it has been eroding there in similar.

Duane: Where does your cultural anthropology lens then come in, in terms of the differences you must see across so many fascinating cultures, and music intersects culture in really interesting ways. So what are you seeing, kind of like with your global cultural anthropologist lens?

Bryon: That’s a great question. To recognize that taste differ by geography or cohort in the US and what’s popular in Montana is not necessarily popular in Miami is one thing, but to recognize that the landscape is way broader than that and tastes differ all the more in artists and music types and genres and subgenres has been really, really interesting and compelling.

It’s also very interesting on the advertising side where you see different markets addressing different opportunities and concerns with regards to consumers. So for example, in the UK there’s a push to really moderate or eliminate a lot of advertising for fatty foods, for example.
And so to be able to talk about, hey, let’s not just exit advertising in this market, there’s an opportunity to actually have some really meaningful conversations around the importance of education, around nutrition and build brands in a different way than you might have thought about through the lens of taste in music, if you will.

That’s a really powerful opportunity, and that’s just one example, but similarly in Latin America, the perspective on digital media is very different than television. And so we try to make things easy for our partners and just really understanding a lot of those nuance in market has been really rewarding because they’re so diverse and so differentiated in that regard.

Duane: What’s been your biggest surprise as you have, you know, transitioned into music video as content? What’s been your biggest surprise in that role?

Bryon: My biggest surprise is probably not specific to the music content as much as it is about the marketplace. As I think about the marketplace through the lens of working at Vevo and and working with our advertising partners, there’s this strong focus on measurement.

But if you were to step back and look at the bigger picture of just the erosion of commercial time and the less and less opportunities there are to speak through video with consumers, to me, a lot of the absence of inventory should lend itself well to more powerful, impactful messaging. And so I really think we’re on the precipice of a more of a creative revolution, so to speak, where clients can begin to recognize: okay, I don’t have place to put this money, what should I do with this money? Maybe it should go back to PR, or maybe it should go back to reinventing the creative brief to recognize that a six second spot is a much more powerful spot in the context of a feed where people are blazing through content and the decay curves are so markedly sharp and people are spread thin on time and attention.

And six second ad is just an example, but we think about where messaging should go and through a lot of the social justice movement the past couple years, we’ve also learned about the importance of authenticity and conversations and being able to have smart approaches to marketing and not just blasting out some ad that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you click on who’s saying it and why.

And so I really do think there’s a lot of opportunity for the market to really enhance the creative conversation over time because you’re gonna have less opportunities to converse with them. You can’t just solve for the problems with frequency like you have for the last 15 years. And so to be able to have that more powerful, more resonant message, of course you wanna eliminate waste and target two or away from the most relevant or irrelevant cohorts in smart, high integrity ways.

But to be able to have those levels of nuance in that messaging, I think really calls for better diagnostics and understanding of how is this creative performing. If media’s carrying it the last 10 yards on its back and is being held accountable for some sort of outcome measurement, then what is the score of that creative when it’s trafficked to be served and delivered? And what is the diagnostic on the content?

We talk a lot about norms for testing shows and putting how much someone likes a particular program or music video into context. Well, the reality is context has changed so much, even though the fundamentals have it, that you’ve gotta understand that your norms may not be as relevant as they used to be because there’s this explosion of content in the marketplace and people’s expectations are different about what this show or what this music video should be delivering on this trend that we’re seeing.

And so I just feel like there’s a lot of opportunity for more research in that area that’s gonna be all the more important as the opportunities to have these conversations with consumers get less and less.

Duane: Looking back across your career, it’s clear that in so many of the different roles that you had, you were really in a position where you were pioneering new ad models.

What have you learned looking back at all the different kinds of research that you’ve been doing? And again, I can think of a number of areas where you were a real pioneer, you know, the whole two screen experience that we talked about earlier, limited interruption, six second ads, ad choice. I mean, there’ve been a lot of those innovations throughout your career, Bryon. What have you learned about kind of like the ad innovation space?

Bryon: I think the theme has been to progress and push the market forward in new ways. Less about a particular insight, like ’less is more’, for example. Or being able to recognize, you know, right time, right message, right context. I think the bigger picture for me is, if everyone leaned in a little bit more in progressing things, and now that we’re less encumbered by the status quo because the market has more fully pivoted towards streaming and new experiences, I’m really encouraged by what the CTV landscape over the next couple cycles really has to offer in terms of ad and programming innovation, because the viewership’s there, but it may stagnate until there’s some material progress in how programming can really level up.

And we see a lot of driven, also powered viewing, that people are gonna consume more of and not less of. If it’s through a YouTube or a TikTok, for example, or through smart platforms and services like HBO Max or Netflix that can recommend things of relevance.

For me, the insight on the advertising side is particularly and on just media research side, is how do we just to continue to test and scale things that make more sense for consumers that also have positive byproducts for advertisers and content owners. Is it good for the three of them and not just one in particular.

And right now we might see some challenges in the market to maybe holding the consumer in a higher or lower regard in recognizing you can give them fewer ads or more relevant ads or make recommendations that are smarter and progress the formats. But if you try to just make this cable 2.0, and make the status quo experience in linear television what we’re seeing in CTV, it’s not really progressing things and the consumer’s gonna sniff that out pretty quick.

And so for me it’s always just how can we keep pushing things forward, keep pushing the market forward. And why the market – I mean the advertising media landscape, sure. But the consumer as well.

Duane: So Bryon, what do you see around the corner? What’s in store for us in the near future?

Bryon: I think there’s some shaking out to do in terms of continued consolidation. We talked a little bit about scale before and when you consider the importance of real meaningful scale being in that a hundred plus million size range, there’s but a few players that are well positioned to take advantage of that.

I think there’s things like voice search that will really flip how people find and enjoy content all the more on its head, and it will really separate the leaders of the pack away who have the [00:51:00] technology infrastructure, the engineering capacity in prowess to be able to keep pushing the market forward in that capacity.

Just make it easier and easier for people to find things, and also finding those levels of synchronicity between screens. Today we hold our mobile phones in our hand while we watch the television, and we interact with both of them, but they’ve yet to really come together. And I suspect over the next couple years we’ll start to see that a bit more, and that’ll be good for commerce and advertisers.

And the ability to have that level of information and commerce in your hand while you’re seeing a message, for example, the ability in general to have experiences that are markedly improved over what we’ve seen in the last 20 years.

Duane: So just to summarize those three key trends to look out for: even more consolidation, easier paths for consumers to find their content, and screen synchronicity.

[music]

So we always close with this question. If you were giving advice to a new generation of researchers in this industry, what would your advice be?

Bryon: One thing I’ve really valued in my career looking back is that there was a point in time where I made the choice to treat my career like a project on my project list.

So just like the other high priorities I was working on at ABC, I recognized the importance of increasing my social map and the marketplace, getting involved in places with the ARF, or just creating a bucket list of, in my mind, Legends of Media Research that I wanted to have conversations with to hear their stories.

And if it’s digging through the old library at ABC about Gale Metzger Smart TV initiative, or getting involved in ARF Councils, that gave me more and more context. Again, the exposure to the buy side, the sell side, the product management side. The investor side has just given me all the more context.

So I think a good sense of advice is just have a diverse set of experiences, and that to me is really, really powerful. There’s nothing wrong with working one place for 20 years, within that you might get a diverse set of experiences or things that are really beneficial there as well. But I’ve really appreciated working in different corporate cultures, for example, and types of research to understand not just what I like, but what I didn’t like, and to be able to understand those things, to be able to steer them a bit moving forward so that that would be my advice.

Duane: ‘The Bryon Schafer Project’. That’s a great file [laughs]. Bryon, such a fascinating career, such an interesting blend of cultural anthropology and econometrics [laughs]

Bryon: It’s been really fun to be able to show my parents that I can pay the bills with a cultural anthropology degree after all these years.

Duane: [laughs] Thank you so much for joining us, Briyon. It was just a fascinating conversation.

Bryon: I really appreciate the time, Duane. Thank you. .

Duane: What a fascinating discussion. So I again, want to thank Bryon and I want to thank you, the audience, for joining us today. Remember to follow or subscribe to this podcast, tell your friends about it, and leave us your comments and reviews and stick around after the podcast if you’d like to learn more about MediaScience. And don’t miss our next episode of Legends of Media Research. Thanks again.

[music]

Female Voice: Almost every major innovation in the TV advertising industry over the course of the past decade was first tested by MediaScience researchers. Whether you’re talking about video ads on mobile phones, or limited interruption ad pods or program context effects, or brand integrations, or pause ads, or picture and picture ads, or six second ads or interactive ad formats.

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I mean, the list goes on and on. All were first tested by MediaScience. MediaScience is the leader in media innovation research. So when you are looking for media or advertising innovation research, collaborate with MediaScience. Learn more at mediascience.com.