Knect365/ TV Connect
A trusted accountable currency and the rollout of
addressable advertising go hand in hand for marketers and media agencies
looking to optimise investment.
When BARB admitted that “in a world of fragmentation,
traditional TV viewing is declining” you knew the waters have been breached.
The UK TV ratings body made the comment in a January report
into SVOD viewing that concludes, “Far from being niche, SVOD services are now
an established part of the television ecosystem.”
Yet the report begins, “Television is still king.”
Both statements are true and speak to the dilemma facing the
marketers of content and advertisers, as they seek the optimum return on
production budgets and ad investment.
Driven by the rise in popularity of people watching online
video, advertisers spent a record £699 million on video ads in the UK in the
first half of 2017 – a 46% year-on-year rise, according to the most up to date
Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report.
The time people spend watching short video clips appears to
have almost trebled over the past three years (Sept 2014 to Sept 2017): from 51
minutes to 2 hrs 21 minutes per week, according to YouGov data.
“The time people spend watching online video has grown
tremendously over the last few years,” says IAB CEO Jon Mew. “It’s little
wonder that video is now the fastest-growing ad format as advertisers look to
tap into the changing way people consume content.”
On the other hand, UK commercial broadcaster lobby group
Thinkbox fields statistics showing that TV accounts for 93.8% of video ad
viewing with the average person in the UK watching more than 20 minutes of
commercials a day. Broadcast’s reach is strong across Europe too. Thinkbox’s
survey suggests that in Spain, the average time spent watching on a TV set has
increased to 3h 51 minutes; and that millennial TV viewing actually increases
as they get older and have kids.
“Over the past decade, TV has proven remarkably resilient in
an era of immense disruption,” asserts Matt Hill, Thinkbox Research and
Planning Director. “Despite the emergence of SVOD services and online video
platforms, TV consumption has remained standfast around the globe.”
But back to BARB. What is more telling about its arguably
belated recognition of the importance and permanence of digital is that one of the
world’s most trusted ratings services still has no cross-platform measurement
in place.
Media agencies and TV marketers worldwide have been calling
for a resolution to this issue for years.
In 2015, the average person watched 216 minutes daily of traditional
consolidated TV (live and viewed within seven days of broadcast), according to
BARB. In 2016, this fell to 212 minutes, a 2% decrease, although the total
amount of time spent in front of the TV is unchanged. The reason for this
apparent disconnect, reckons BARB, is that a fast-growing area of activity is
“unmatched” viewing, a figure that has reached almost 19% in recent months. It
puts most of this down to people watching programming via SVOD.
Cross platform conundrum
BARB’s Dovetail Fusion reports are to be published regularly
from March (compiled by Kantar Media) and will deliver the agency’s first
cross-platform measurement using digital view data from the likes of Sky and
the BBC.
Yet BARB isn’t able to measure actual viewing to SVOD
services without the cooperation of service providers like Netflix and Amazon
Video.
The clamour for a trusted and accountable multiple-screen
audience currency is necessary to unlock further spend against video online and
to shore up the value of ads placed against live/linear schedules.
A September 2017 study by IAB Europe found that 90% of
European industry stakeholders believe brands would spend more on digital
channels if cross-media measurement capabilities were improved.
“The gap between advertising models for linear TV and
digital video is closing, and the industry is moving towards integration. The
greatest challenge remains measurement.” – Thomas Bremond, GM,
International, Advanced Advertising, FreeWheel
“The gap between advertising models for linear TV and
digital video is closing, and the industry is moving towards integration,” says
Thomas Bremond, GM, International, Advanced Advertising, FreeWheel. “The
greatest challenge remains measurement.”
In the absence of an accepted metric to combine TV and digital
a number of stakeholders have developed their own systems.
In the US, Google has made its traditional TV inventory
available via DoubleClick, allowing advertisers to buy linear TV spots
programmatically. “We’re in the golden age of video, and while this explosion
of great content is great for users, it creates a lot of complexity for
advertisers and publishers,” blogged Rany Ng, director, product management,
Google, about the announcement.
Thinkbox offers IPA TouchPoints, a planning tool aggregating
data from a 5,000-strong media diary and questionnaire intended as a stop gap
before Dovetail launches.
IAB Europe is working on a cross-industry European
Viewability Initiative which aims to improve the accuracy and consistency
of measuring the viewability of delivered impressions. It thinks this will help
make digital advertising more directly comparable with TV.
And just this month [February 2018] Discovery introduced
‘Total TV’ an approach for audience measurement during live events kicking off
with Eurosport’s coverage of the recent Winter Olympics in South Korea. It
includes engagement with content across all Discovery’s digital and social
media properties.
“It neatly meshes data from different sources,” explained
Chris Jones, Global Lead, Research & Evaluation at Publicis Media Sports
& Entertainment, which helped implement the system. “Importantly, official
audited data from television and online measurement systems are at the heart of
the calculation. But clever use of survey research allows us to understand the
cross-over in people who connect with the Games via both TV and digital/social
platforms, meaning we can remove any double counting and determine the true
pan-European audience reach of an event for the first time.”
Brand safe environment
A need for a cross-platform measure does not exist in
isolation of another top priority for marketers, that of brand safety. Given
the issues that befell YouTube and other unmoderated user-generated platforms
in 2016, when ads were placed alongside brand inappropriate content (WPP-owned
GroupM downgrading its expectations of internet advertising growth as a
result), efforts are being made to give online advertising the safety net of a
managed environment.
“It is now more critical than ever to reinforce the quality
of the digital advertising environment to ensure that advertisers have strong
confidence, and underpin the delivery of free content,” says Townsend Feehan,
CEO, IAB Europe. “Ensuring that viewable impressions are measured correctly and
consistently across all markets in Europe is a key first step.”
Tim Sewell, CEO at digital video distribution company
Yospace, says: “Improved standards certainly need to be agreed in the OTT
space, but this plays to the broadcasters’ strengths and the reasons for their
enthusiasm are clear: delivering a true premium quality of service is their ace
card – not just in terms of viewer experience, but for advertisers too. It’s
the key differentiator between broadcasters and the likes of Facebook and
YouTube, where three seconds is enough to count as an ad view.”
While brand safety and accountability issues are a wake-up
call for digital, the march of ad spend onto Google and increasingly Facebook
means traditional media needs to respond.
They are doing in this in several ways. Later this year four
of Europe’s largest commercial broadcasters will launch a European
video-on-demand exchange to cater for the growing demand for multi-territory
video campaigns.
Traditional media fights back
European Broadcaster Exchange (EBX) is a joint venture
between Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, Italy’s Mediaset, France’s TF1 Group and
Channel 4 in the UK. It claims to reach 160 million viewers a month across all
member VOD platforms.
“Many international companies have a strong demand for
high-quality and brand-safe advertising environments in the video sector,”
explained ProSiebenSat.1 COO, Christof Wahl at launch. “EBX will offer them the
opportunity to book pan-European campaigns in an economic area with a
population of more than 250 million in an automated manner. This will allow us
to gain access to additional ad budgets that we were previously unable to
address on a national level.”
Pay TV operator Sky, which of course relies more heavily on
subscriptions, is also feeling the pinch from the GAFA (Google, Amazon,
Facebook and Apple). Its trump card Sky AdSmart has been in play since early
2014 and enables advertisers to target households based on factors such as age,
location and life stage from a combination of Sky’s own customer data as well
as info from consumer profile experts like Experian. This means that smaller
advertisers can cut their cloth however they want and only reach (and pay for)
highly specific households.
According to Sky the addressable service delivers a 75%
return rate with channel-switching during a targeted advert reduced by 48%.
Virgin Media recently integrated AdSmart into its STBs gave the two companies
access to 30 million viewers in the UK and Ireland and more scale to compete
with social media networks.
Elsewhere, Liberty Global is going on the offensive against
GAFA with an aggressive pitch to advertisers of the veracity and scale of data
harvested from its own platforms.
“There are lots of fears about how big the threat GAFA has become
and how regulation doesn’t seem to apply to them but they don’t have the rich
data about how customers behave which we do,” Laurence Miall-d’Aout, VP, Data
and Advanced Advertising, Liberty Global told Cable Congress. “That is our data
and it is up to us – and the cable industry as a whole – to harness this data
better.”
The cable giant is developing Liberty Insights, presented as
a single platform encompassing aggregated consumer data from its 24 million
customers, accessed over 14 million devices and uniting 15 billion viewing
hours combining customer and viewing data with third-party data.
It will use Machine Learning to offer insights on
advertising and programming to broadcasters within its stable on a local and
macro level.
For commercial broadcasters the need to address targeted ads
is more pressing. STV and Channel 4 have been most proactive with the latter
beginning 2018 offering personalised advertising via All 4 across every
channel, including mobile, tablet, games consoles and smart TVs. In recent
figures the broadcaster reported more than 60 million monthly viewers to All 4
with digital revenues soaring 24% year on year to £102 million. A targeted ad
service is overdue from ITV but this can be expected later this year.
Both STV and C4 oblige viewers to register their consent.
That’s important since broadcasters will need to meet strict privacy rules
before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation come into force in May.
The effectiveness of increasingly granular targeting goes
hand in hand with technologies to automate the process of insertion in
individual streams. According to IAB Europe/IHS Markit, more than half (50.1%)
of European display ad revenue is now traded programmatically.
“Programmatic needs rules and should be about automation –
not simply be automatic,” advises Bremond. “Publishers should focus on premium
video content, where there is a direct relationship between the buyer and
seller, and transactions should take place in a saleable, brand safe
environment.”
Mobile and social strategies
Mobile continues to be a major growth driver of
programmatic. With mobile advertising projected to reach nearly US$128 billion
globally in 2018 (according to Zenith Media) and video set to account for
three quarters of all mobile traffic by 2020 (per Cisco) content publishers
must also look to tailor strategies around mobile.
It is in this context that Viacom, Turner, NBCU and
Discovery separately partner with Snap Inc to create original content for
Snapchat's Discover section. In Viacom’s case the agreement also grants
Viacom the right to sell Snapchat’s US-owned ad inventory. Discovery’s
pact will see bespoke user-generated content from the Winter Games published to
Snapchat users across Europe. Engagement figures from this will be included in
Discovery’s Total TV metric. Buzzfeed is creating NBCU’s bespoke content from
South Korea in a tie-up which The Wall Street Journal estimates will net US$75m
in new ad revenue.
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