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Screen Wars: Win the Battle for Attention with Convergent TV
Maximize Your Ad How to Win the Battle for Attention with Convergent TV and Video Advertising
Are you getting the most out of your TV and video ad spend? Consumers are watching content on more screens, channels, and platforms than ever before. How can you consistently reach your target audience in this constantly changing landscape?
Screen Wars is your guide to survive and thrive through the complexities of convergent TV. Authored by Michael Beach, CEO of Cross Screen Media, this book delves into the nuances of video advertising in an era where traditional boundaries have blurred. With over a decade of expertise in TV and video advertising, Michael's unique perspective is rich with actionable strategies to navigate and capitalize on the opportunities within the convergent TV landscape.
Whether you're an advertiser aiming to optimize spend, an agency increasing your client’s reach, or a network adapting to new content consumption behaviors, Screen Wars offers the insights you need to stay ahead of the curve.
Inside this book, you’ll Future-Proofed Advertising Tactics for effective advertising across multiple screens and platforms.Strategies to Capture Viewer How to ensure your ads resonate and engage the right audience.Historical Data and Future Understand the evolution and future trajectory of TV and video ads.Consumer Viewing Learn how viewing preferences are shifting and what it means for your strategy.** Exclusive full-color download of every chart and graph from the book, providing a visual guide to mastering convergent TV.
Screen Wars not only explains the current state of TV advertising but also prepares you for the future shifts that will define the success of the industry. This book is an essential tool for anyone involved in the buying, selling, or creation of video advertising.
If your target customer never sees your ad, nothing else you do matters. Get your copy of Screen Wars today and win the battle for attention.
Are you getting the most out of your TV and video ad spend? Consumers are watching content on more screens, channels, and platforms than ever before. How can you consistently reach your target audience in this constantly changing landscape?
Screen Wars is your guide to survive and thrive through the complexities of convergent TV. Authored by Michael Beach, CEO of Cross Screen Media, this book delves into the nuances of video advertising in an era where traditional boundaries have blurred. With over a decade of expertise in TV and video advertising, Michael's unique perspective is rich with actionable strategies to navigate and capitalize on the opportunities within the convergent TV landscape.
Whether you're an advertiser aiming to optimize spend, an agency increasing your client’s reach, or a network adapting to new content consumption behaviors, Screen Wars offers the insights you need to stay ahead of the curve.
Inside this book, you’ll Future-Proofed Advertising Tactics for effective advertising across multiple screens and platforms.Strategies to Capture Viewer How to ensure your ads resonate and engage the right audience.Historical Data and Future Understand the evolution and future trajectory of TV and video ads.Consumer Viewing Learn how viewing preferences are shifting and what it means for your strategy.** Exclusive full-color download of every chart and graph from the book, providing a visual guide to mastering convergent TV.
Screen Wars not only explains the current state of TV advertising but also prepares you for the future shifts that will define the success of the industry. This book is an essential tool for anyone involved in the buying, selling, or creation of video advertising.
If your target customer never sees your ad, nothing else you do matters. Get your copy of Screen Wars today and win the battle for attention.
150 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 21, 2024
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10 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 23, 2025
This was a baffling experience. Why every number and several random words were bolded is beyond my ability to comprehend, but it was incredibly distracting, especially when it was not a figure being quoted but just a word being used, e.g. bolding the word "zero" in the expression "ground zero". I couldn't tell if this was being done for emphasis instead of italics, if it was a weird business thing, or just a quirk of a first-time author.
The page layout with so many charts and asides like definitions or "why does this matter" was a strange choice for such a short, small book. Similarly, sections and chapters just ended seemingly mid-anecdote. For example, at the end of one section the author (using odd names for his children despite including their real names in the dedication?) told a story about their supposedly wanting to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and discovering Apply TV had the exclusive rights to it and they would need a subscription. THAT'S IT. End of story, end of section. It felt like it was setting up a point about subscription fatigue, but it just ended there and was never mentioned again.
Even more jarring, at the end of "parts" of the book, the chapter would just end similarly to the above example anecdote, but then there would be one last paragraph tacked on that would say, "In Part X I will talk about [insert the exact title of the next part]," then the very next page, the title page for that Part, was that exact phrase, verbatim. It happened more than once.
Overall, the entire thing was very superficial. The front half was entirely unnecessary, as I feel like anyone picking this book up and purchasing it already accepts the premise that the way we watch tv is undergoing a shift. The back half was mostly an ad for Cross Screen Media, though those last chapters felt more genuine and had more to say than what came before. You could feel the author was far more invested in those chapters and they were much more interesting for it.
That said, many of the arguments made throughout were incredibly flimsy. The one example that really stuck out to me was the comparison of the finales of M*A*S*H and Game of Thrones, used to "prove" how viewership numbers are shifting due to our change in screen habits. While certainly a factor to some extent, this is not such a simple comparison, not least because the former is still widely considered one of the best series finales ever written and the last came as the cherry on top of the shit sundae that was the last season of a show that had blown past its available source material and steadily alienated its long-term fans (now widely considered one of the WORST series finales of all time).
It lacked academic rigor, to which the response is always that we shouldn't expect this from business folk. I counter that this lack of rigor, and our excusing it and not expecting it, is itself a source of a lot of problems in tech and business in 2024, but that is a whole other can of worms I've discussed elsewhere. This shift in how we consume media is absolutely a topic worth exploring, but one this book only pokes at superficially in a way that felt a lot like an unnecessary preamble to a sales pitch, and certainly not one that can be done any justice in about 50 pages. At the very least, the ignoring of other potential factors like in the above example is not telling the entire story. Perhaps it was cut for brevity, but that just underscores the need for a longer book to do this topic justice.
Lastly, there is the issue of the ethics of modern advertising and whether the unbounded growth of ad spending is actually a good thing. It's great for a CEO wanting to grow a company, not so much for society at large, I think. The fact that political advertising in particular has had such runaway growth as to preclude ordinary citizens from participating in their own government doesn't even warrant a mention; that growth is treated as an unalloyed positive. There is no mention of genuine privacy concerns over the sort of monitoring and tracking necessary for the targeting described in the latter half of this book (this is always discussed in this industry as if reasonable regulation is an unreasonable and inconvenient hinderance to just doing whatever we want in the name of profit).
I remind the reader of a particular incident with Target 12 years ago, where the tracking of customer buying habits outed a teenage pregnancy the poor girl wasn't even aware of. To quote Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
I wholeheartedly believe advertising to be the single greatest collective waste of human resources in our history as a species, so I am very much not the target audience here. But this era of such precise targeting has injected it with steroids, and the glee CEOs like this author feel for that is terrifying, especially when it seeks to treat human beings as the end product to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This terror is tenfold when talking about political advertising and using these tools to hijack ourdemocracy pay-to-play oligarchy.
I'll end by recommending a different book I just finished reading recently, which discusses that exact question about ethics in the tech industry and the damage done by that focus on chasing the almighty dollar. It serves as an excellent counterpoint: Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
---------------------
I had originally not posted this review, because working for the author I felt like I'd just keep my feelings to myself and not make waves. But after an email blast sent out to all employees today that contained some astonishingly tone-deaf and abhorrent content, if he can share his reprehensible opinions in his official capacity as CEO of a company, I'm not obliged to keep my opinions hidden any longer.
---------------------
I no longer work at CSM. In the meeting where this was dropped on me, this review in particular was thrown in my face as an explicit reason.
[more to come after some more revision]
The page layout with so many charts and asides like definitions or "why does this matter" was a strange choice for such a short, small book. Similarly, sections and chapters just ended seemingly mid-anecdote. For example, at the end of one section the author (using odd names for his children despite including their real names in the dedication?) told a story about their supposedly wanting to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and discovering Apply TV had the exclusive rights to it and they would need a subscription. THAT'S IT. End of story, end of section. It felt like it was setting up a point about subscription fatigue, but it just ended there and was never mentioned again.
Even more jarring, at the end of "parts" of the book, the chapter would just end similarly to the above example anecdote, but then there would be one last paragraph tacked on that would say, "In Part X I will talk about [insert the exact title of the next part]," then the very next page, the title page for that Part, was that exact phrase, verbatim. It happened more than once.
Overall, the entire thing was very superficial. The front half was entirely unnecessary, as I feel like anyone picking this book up and purchasing it already accepts the premise that the way we watch tv is undergoing a shift. The back half was mostly an ad for Cross Screen Media, though those last chapters felt more genuine and had more to say than what came before. You could feel the author was far more invested in those chapters and they were much more interesting for it.
That said, many of the arguments made throughout were incredibly flimsy. The one example that really stuck out to me was the comparison of the finales of M*A*S*H and Game of Thrones, used to "prove" how viewership numbers are shifting due to our change in screen habits. While certainly a factor to some extent, this is not such a simple comparison, not least because the former is still widely considered one of the best series finales ever written and the last came as the cherry on top of the shit sundae that was the last season of a show that had blown past its available source material and steadily alienated its long-term fans (now widely considered one of the WORST series finales of all time).
It lacked academic rigor, to which the response is always that we shouldn't expect this from business folk. I counter that this lack of rigor, and our excusing it and not expecting it, is itself a source of a lot of problems in tech and business in 2024, but that is a whole other can of worms I've discussed elsewhere. This shift in how we consume media is absolutely a topic worth exploring, but one this book only pokes at superficially in a way that felt a lot like an unnecessary preamble to a sales pitch, and certainly not one that can be done any justice in about 50 pages. At the very least, the ignoring of other potential factors like in the above example is not telling the entire story. Perhaps it was cut for brevity, but that just underscores the need for a longer book to do this topic justice.
Lastly, there is the issue of the ethics of modern advertising and whether the unbounded growth of ad spending is actually a good thing. It's great for a CEO wanting to grow a company, not so much for society at large, I think. The fact that political advertising in particular has had such runaway growth as to preclude ordinary citizens from participating in their own government doesn't even warrant a mention; that growth is treated as an unalloyed positive. There is no mention of genuine privacy concerns over the sort of monitoring and tracking necessary for the targeting described in the latter half of this book (this is always discussed in this industry as if reasonable regulation is an unreasonable and inconvenient hinderance to just doing whatever we want in the name of profit).
I remind the reader of a particular incident with Target 12 years ago, where the tracking of customer buying habits outed a teenage pregnancy the poor girl wasn't even aware of. To quote Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
I wholeheartedly believe advertising to be the single greatest collective waste of human resources in our history as a species, so I am very much not the target audience here. But this era of such precise targeting has injected it with steroids, and the glee CEOs like this author feel for that is terrifying, especially when it seeks to treat human beings as the end product to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This terror is tenfold when talking about political advertising and using these tools to hijack our
I'll end by recommending a different book I just finished reading recently, which discusses that exact question about ethics in the tech industry and the damage done by that focus on chasing the almighty dollar. It serves as an excellent counterpoint: Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
---------------------
I had originally not posted this review, because working for the author I felt like I'd just keep my feelings to myself and not make waves. But after an email blast sent out to all employees today that contained some astonishingly tone-deaf and abhorrent content, if he can share his reprehensible opinions in his official capacity as CEO of a company, I'm not obliged to keep my opinions hidden any longer.
---------------------
I no longer work at CSM. In the meeting where this was dropped on me, this review in particular was thrown in my face as an explicit reason.
[more to come after some more revision]
May 30, 2024
Screen Wars provides an exceptional analysis of the history and future of video advertising. The author effectively outlines the evolution of the industry, from the first television commercial viewed by a limited audience, to the final episode of "M*A*S*H" where advertisers reached over 60% of American households, to the present landscape where advertisers must navigate numerous platforms and viewing options. The narrative transforms a complex subject into an accessible and engaging read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the dynamics of TV/Streaming/digital advertising.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews