What’s The CPM On Your Culture?

Today’s AdAge proffers an article and video bizarrely entitled NBC’s New Upfront Format Puzzles Media Buyers. Apparently, NBC’s presentation didn’t include any calls to action or direct sales pitches, and all those dewey-eyed media buyers were confused! (Note to AdAge: The people who get confused when a call to action isn’t present are called account executives.)

If you haven’t had enough surrealism yet today, skip ahead to about 1:53 in the video, where Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, attempts to explain the conundrum without actually saying anything. The key excerpt:

In the coming years, what it’s going to be best served to do is going to be to actually cater to media buyers that are more interested in buying culture and cultural relevance, and buying affiliations with the media company’s content, than the targeting and the addressability aspects of it.

This is hugely enlightening. So many times, publishers came to present to me, and then went on and on about their site without touching on the location of the ads and being as vague as possible about their targeting methodologies. And I would think, who have these people been talking to, that they think this is the kind of stuff anyone at an agency wants to hear? But now I know…they’ve been talking to this fucking guy. Thanks, Ian!