With FAST, content providers and aggregators have an opportunity to fuse the best of linear and digital – delivering bundled products that provide reach, interactivity and performance. However, they need a calculated strategy to avoid some of the complexities of FAST in order to reap the rewards of this exciting media format.

What’s so appealing about FAST

For publishers looking for a new outlet for their content that will provide net-new audiences, FAST is a big opportunity. Analyst firm Omdia foresees FAST channel revenues to reach $12 billion by 2027. However, the FAST market is not uniform. In the U.S., FAST has caught on much more quickly, where cable TV prices are very high and TV ad loads take up a large percentage of view time. Many people have embraced all forms of digital TV as an alternative to cable.

In Europe, viewers have been slower to drop linear TV, partly because it has taken more time for the market to offer enough content on FAST channels to give viewers the selection they want. This means that most TV ad spending is still on linear, but change is inevitable. Variety predicts that Western Europe will lose about 7 million more Pay TV subscribers by 2027.

FAST – a mix of linear and digital 

For advertisers, FAST offers many benefits. FAST delivers a combination of long-form content programming and in-stream commercials that is similar to linear TV. Viewers can choose from on-demand content and live-streaming, which can refer to actual live events like professional sports, or content that is streaming in real-time that’s the same as what is being broadcast on a linear channel at the same time.

Along with that comes a number of elements that will be familiar to linear advertisers. First is the reach – particularly in the U.S. today. Many viewers of FAST TV have “cut the cord” or are light linear TV viewers, so advertisers can get a valuable and big audience on the channel. Scheduling, dynamic ad insertion and programming all work similarly on FAST as on regular linear, often because the top channels are managed by traditional TV broadcasters. What’s more, advertisers can use third-party currencies, which is a major plus.

There are also a number of key digital elements to FAST that will remind advertisers of AVOD. It’s addressable, which allows advertisers to target audiences using first and third-party data. FAST is also interactive. Viewers can use their remote control to click on ads and even purchase products.

Get the most from FAST advertising 

For publishers to profit from FAST content, they must have a strategy in place that helps advertisers make the most of this exciting channel. That means FAST must be part of the cohesive whole of a publisher’s offering, not a separate channel off to the side. Additionally, advertisers need a clear understanding of the different audiences, content availability and ad experiences on FAST vs. other content so they don’t think of FAST as a one-for-one replacement for linear TV.

Publishers should also encourage advertisers to test the unique elements of FAST advertising including interactivity and targeting. When advertisers see that they can get more engagement from their key audiences they will be willing to pay higher CPMs for the inventory.

To make all of this work, it’s important to have insight and control across the entire product portfolio. With a unified product catalogue, publishers can provide advertisers with smarter proposals that help them reach audiences across channels with products that make the most sense for each impression.

Publishers with a centralised order management workflow can also ensure that they are optimising ad delivery across FAST and other channels, incorporating elements like universal frequency capping and yield maximization.

FAST offers advertisers an opportunity to reach a valuable audience with ads that combine the best of both linear and digital. Publishers must take advantage of this window with a strategy that makes the most of FAST so that it commands the right price and brings in demand. FAST is likely the “future of TV” so publishers set the tone for their future advertising business with the way they sell and deliver FAST today.

The search behaviour habits now being leveraged can be combined with any of 1,000+ existing AdSmart attributes – from postcodes to life stage, or mosaic groups – to refine campaigns. Ruth Cartwright, Investment Director at Sky Media, believes that, “Being able to embrace the best capabilities of digital but in the brand safe, big-screen world of TV, makes campaigns more relevant and impactful.”

Sky says its latest advertising innovation is driven by industry demand to bring digital and TV campaigns closer together. “Search Behaviour attributes allows brands, for the first time, to target audiences based on specific online search behaviours, including frequency and intent,” the company explains.

Seven search behaviour categories are available at launch: Home & Garden, Travel, News, Job & Education, Arts and Entertainment, Games, and Pets & Animals. As well as mixing this knowledge with existing AdSmart attributes, it can also be matched to advertiser first-party data. “As an example, a custom campaign could see a holiday or insurance company target those who are actively searching for holidays or flights. This could be further refined or creatively adapted to those looking at beach, sightseeing or ski holidays in a specific area of the country,” Sky Media explains.

The Search Behaviour targeting capability has been developed in conjunction with Captify, which boasts of having the largest onsite search dataset outside walled gardens, harnessing 1+ billion searches a day on 2+ billion devices covering 6+ million websites from over 1,500 publishers (and all in five languages!). Captify emphasises how up to date its data is (real-time), demonstrating interests and needs right now. Captify talks of having “the first intent-powered audience platform for the open web”.

Clarissa is deployed as-a-service and supports other business insight systems at Vodafone. It provides a holistic view across all video and TV data, and complies with GDPR and local advertising standards.

Vodafone and its partner AdScanner TV use event data from Clarissa to measure advertising viewership, while taking into account how viewers’ interactions with the GigaTV service affects the effectiveness of an advert. Vodafone and its partners can also use the viewing insights to identify new audience segments of interest to advertisers and agencies. Insights also support Vodafone’s use of Synamedia Iris for addressable advertising.

Vodafone is using Clarissa to inform data-driven decisions such as the development of STB features, and how to update services to increase consumption. In one example, Clarissa took under 24 hours to uncover how many concurrent recording streams Giga TV viewers were accessing. This helped inform decisions about the capabilities to include in Vodafone’s next generation of STBs.

Wolfgang Zeller, Head of TV Architecture and Development at Vodafone Group, says, “What felt like mission impossible became mission possible thanks to Clarissa. It gives us a ton of information on the customer service usage so we can make really data-driven decisions. Integration with our existing infrastructure and third-party solutions was seamless and painless, with minimal disruption.”

“With Clarissa, we’ve created a single source of truth for Vodafone Deutschland to use across the organisation, and ensured it was GDPR compliant from the get-go,” explains Amruta Shankar, Director of Data and Analytics at Synamedia. “By normalising all the data into consistent video-aligned metrics, Clarissa offers Vodafone a treasure trove of insights.”

Vodafone has a multi-year contract with Synamedia (announced in April 2020) that includes other solutions, including set-top box software and security.

However, with the shift to TV streaming, advertisers now have an opportunity to reach and engage with consumers on the most powerful medium like never before. TV streaming offers consumers a wide variety of quality content to choose from, often at a lower cost than linear Pay TV. Findings from Roku’s 2021 Streaming Decade report shows that 90% of UK consumers now class themselves as streamers, and 2 in 3 are willing to pay for an ad-supported service at a lower cost than a monthly subscription, with free services that are completely ad-supported offering even more choice.

Optimising for the user helps the advertiser too

Although subscription models are popular, consumers are also open to advertising on TV streaming in exchange for quality content and lower costs. By having an innovative content and advertising experience, platforms and streaming services can drive engagement with consumers to a level only possible by having direct relationships with viewers. This in turn enables those providers to offer richer audience data and large, relevant audiences – making them a compelling investment source for advertisers seeking to reach new viewers and re-engage with those they once targeted on linear. That investment creates a flywheel effect, allowing ad-supported streaming services to continuously level up the experience and adding more entertainment, attracting more viewers and more advertising opportunities. However, while the theory is sound, how can this flywheel effect deliver positive advertising returns?

Identifying the advertising opportunities

On TV streaming there are many subscription VOD services that don’t currently feature advertising. However, advertising supported business models are increasingly taking a greater hold of the market. For advertisers, it represents an opportunity to diversify their inventory and to reach audiences who’ve shifted away from linear.

And it’s not a trend solely focused on millennials or Gen Z; streaming has become popular across all age groups. Our report shows that 94% of 18 – 40-year-olds are active streamers, whilst 84% of those aged 41 – 70 are regular streamers too. This change in behaviour means advertisers cannot think of streaming as simply an optional extra, it needs to be part of a fully integrated investment strategy targeting a range of demographics.

TV streaming can also be a powerful mechanism for brands new to TV advertising. Targeted campaigns on traditional linear TV in the UK is limited only to regional geographies, which still requires a large investment and typically leads to waste. In contrast, by relying on data and an understanding of the audiences likely to watch content on streaming services, advertisers on these services can be much more tailored in the audiences they target. In doing so, enabling the campaign efficacy and reach to be much higher and more likely to lead to better long- and short-term campaign metrics as a result.

When part of a unified platform, streaming also enables advertisers to gain one holistic view of consumers across services. This insight provides brands with the opportunity to reach viewers across streaming services, aligning with their interests through a much more targeted approach that further reduces wasted spend. In the future, such a setup could even translate into complete cross-media measurement mechanism that seamlessly blends all media into one metric.

Find the right partnerships

With the rapid growth of TV streaming, some are arguing we’re entering a new gold rush in the industry. The boom in TV streaming has created a very competitive market, with numerous streaming platforms and tech companies competing over content, customer experience and low costs. The challenge now for advertisers isn’t whether to invest in streaming services, it is which services and platforms they need to consider.

As more marketers and brands, particularly digital brands – those born from the digital era – discover the benefits of TV streaming advertising, the broader industry will start to benefit from the trickle down of those investments – with analysts, vendors, writers, producers, creatives and more in line to benefit from the boom of TV streaming advertising.

Making great TV content is expensive, and it’s crucial that the advertising industry recognises and understands the unique value that only TV entertainment delivers – and are prepared to make the investment to ensure it remains a premium inventory.

The future of TV

Streaming is the future of TV, and it represents a huge opportunity for advertisers, platforms, and services. For consumers, streaming means more choice and easier access to the premium entertainment they love. And, as consumers shift more of their entertainment time to streaming, incorporating ad-supported services into their viewing stack makes perfect sense. To deliver the best opportunities for all parties, TV streaming should continue to deliver the basics of great TV: premium content and a great user experience that makes it easy for consumers to access the entertainment of their choice.

Viewers will be able to press “OK” with their remote on a shoppable ad, and then proceed to check-out. Their payment details will be pre-populated from Roku’s payment platform, Roku Pay, and after tapping “OK” on the Walmart checkout page, the order is placed. Users will then receive a confirmation email from Walmart, including shipping, return, and support information.

Roku’s ad-buying platform for TV streaming – OneView – will exclusively have the ability to activate and measure these shoppable ads. The company believes its ad tech stack – with targeting, optimisation and measurement capabilities – will “bring all the benefits of streaming TV advertising…to the commerce partnership.”

Through Roku Brand Studio, advertisers will be able to design creative and branded content specifically for a TV streaming and shopping environment.

Peter Hamilton, Head of TV Commerce at Roku, said: “We’re making shopping on TV as easy as it is on social. For years, streamers have purchased new Roku devices and signed up for millions of subscriptions with their Roku remote. Streaming commerce brings that same ease and convenience to marketers and shoppers.”

Speaking at Connected TV World Summit last month, the Belgian telco noted that by tagging data streams and tagging the video in which the ad is played, it knows which viewers have watched any given linear ad. As Proximus moves towards linking both linear and digital with addressable, the ability for the company to track which viewers have not been exposed to certain ads allows for addressable campaigns to run across devices.

He remarked: “If you saw certain ads on TV – addressable ads on TV –  a little bit later you could come to your PC environment and see a follow up ad.

“We don’t do this today, but as a telco we are really rich with traffic data. We know all the websites which you [visit]. Unlocking all that traffic data would mean consumers could go to a website about house renovations and we could link that on TV with an addressable spot for a new refrigerator or something for the bathroom.”

Marien believes merging the linear and digital worlds will come with a learning curve due to differences between the two domains – such as the CPM on digital being significantly lower than for the TV world. But he noted that Proximus has already begun the work of linking the two, establishing a joint venture called Ads and Data, to explore how addressable campaigns can be coordinated across linear and digital.

A significant challenge involved in targeting ads across these domains is consent gathering and privacy, according to Marien. He commented: “We are the tech provider but we are also the data provider. We gather our data and we create different segments of the data which are available to broadcasters. This is not just our data but also third-party data that we integrate in an anonymous way through a sort of bunker system, where we can create even larger segments or have data from advertisers in there. Everything has to be privacy, privacy, privacy.”

To tackle consent gathering, Marien said that Proximus built a very large, GDPR-compliant consent engine which the company uses, not only for advertisers, but at other points where people should give their consent.

He noted that Proximus was the first IP TV operator worldwide to introduce addressable: “At a certain moment, we saw the tech became available to do addressability, we saw that broadcaster and advertisers were willing and starting to adopt it. So, we started a project – not on the big screen at first – but on smart phones and tablets because there the tech integration was much easier. We learned a lot and did a lot of trials. We then moved that implementation to set-top-boxes (STB) because we work with STB.”

To track light TV viewers on connected TV and run addressable campaigns to viewers who haven’t yet been exposed, the Italian sales house for Mediaset developed an HbbTV app. Colombo explained: “Once a user is connecting to one of our broadcast channels, minute by minute we know what is going on over the TV screen, so we know if they’ve been exposed to an ad or if they haven’t been reached at all.”

This allows media planners to reach effective frequency levels with each viewer, Colombo said, as Publitalia ‘80 can identify who has been exposed to a linear campaign only once or twice, and can then target those viewers [in connected TV] to increase frequency to four or five exposures.

Colombo stressed that advertising – just like content – should be a conversation between a brand and a consumer across different media. She explained how, through an algorithm, Publitalia ’80 was able to link a TV set with all the people in a household and other media they are consuming, as part of its efforts to establish consumer identity. “We call it the family graph,” Colombo said, “We are able to create this family and know what they are interested in.

“For example, if we knew they were passionate about cooking because they were surfing a specific page on a website, we could serve them a campaign on connected TV based on that.” She elaborated that the company can create extra reach by targeting consumers on mobile phones when Publitalia ‘80 detects that the user has not been served an ad on their TV screen. The sales house can also do sequencing, where the big branding message of a campaign is delivered to users on the TV, and then, later in the afternoon or the next day, they can be targeted [using adjusted creative] with a call to action.

Speaking at Connected TV World Summit last month, Colombo also said  attribution modelling performed by Publitalia ’80 could prove the effectiveness of a campaign on business outcomes. Eight million users in Italy have the software that supports the company’s attribution modelling on their mobile devices. Based on the websites, as well as the physical locations, that this super-panel of consumers visits, Publitalia ’80 is able to track their interests.

Speaking about a campaign for automotive brands, she said: “We knew the family behind the TV screen and could see whether they were going to a dealership after watching the ad, or if they were surfing a website after we showed them the CTV campaign. So, we started building attribution modelling and proved that it worked. We could see an uplift in people going to the dealership.” In this way, the sales house is able to “connect the last mile”.

Colombo believes that this kind of attribution modelling points towards a cookie-free future. In the past, linear TV has always worked with panels, she noted, where between 2,000 and 3,000 people would be interviewed and this data would be extrapolated to reflect the population. With attribution modelling, Publitalia ’80 often sees 200,000 to 300,000 users taking an action after seeing ad, which the company tracks. This scale allows the company to “sit in between the two worlds” of linear and digital, while getting the “very explicit consent of the consumer”.

In addition to linear and connected TV, the company recently introduced digital into its attribution modelling, and Colombo says it is now looking to introduce Digital Out Of Home (DOOH).

This will include highlights from the Qatar 2022 World Cup, Love Island and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! Others ITV sports broadcasting which will feature includes coverage of the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the FA Cup.

Advertisers will be able to leverage Twitter’s targeting tools through Twitter Amplify while placing ads alongside ITV’s content offering on the website. Over the course of the partnership, the Twitter Next team will produce a series of activations across ITV’s schedule.

Theo Luke, Senior Director of Global Content Partnerships, Twitter, said: “Both Twitter and ITV are at the heart of so many conversations across the UK, so being able to bring the biggest cultural and sporting moments to users on an even greater scale is incredibly exciting.

Since the start of our partnership with ITV back in 2018, we’ve been incredibly impressed by the creativity of their editorial unit alongside the commercial aptitude and collaboration of their sales teams. Through Twitter Amplify and the addition of Twitter Next activations to this partnership, advertisers will have even more opportunities to engage with the very best of ITV’s programming in even more impactful ways.”

Pathman Ruthirapathy, Digital Partnerships Controller, ITV, commented: “We’re really excited about continuing ITV’s long-standing partnership with Twitter. The Twitter Amplify product will be available on some of the nation’s most loved and talked about shows including the FIFA World Cup, Love Island and I’m A Celeb.

“Over the years, Twitter has been a powerful tool in driving conversations and engaging fans around some of our favourite TV moments. This is a fantastic opportunity for advertisers to reach new audiences and extend their relationship with ITV’s content.”

Opportunities to engage large sporting audiences via streaming platforms are growing fast. Last year, viewing figures for live highlights of England’s four-test series against India reached 2 million on All 4 — marking the platform’s biggest ever week. The BBC also saw a record-breaking 100 million online viewing requests during the Tokyo Olympic Games — up from 68.3 million for Rio 2016 — while at a wider level, studies show 73% of UK fans would be happy to only view streamed sports. In just a few weeks, live coverage of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics will be delivered across an array of broadcast and online channels, including Sky, Eurosport, BBC iPlayer, NBCUniversal and its own streaming platform, Peacock.

Yet complexity has developed too. Live sports always had both positives and pitfalls, including broadcast TV’s scope for instant mass reach and difficulty achieving precise measurement across ever-changing ad slots. Now, the move to streaming has introduced new challenges and opportunities; less capacity for these large scale ‘reach moments’, but also substantially improved audience segmentation and message variation potential.

Making the most of soaring streaming adoption is going to mean taking a smarter approach to ensure ads can adjust to unpredictable play and ad breaks.

Keeping up with shifting goalposts

Marketers have heard plenty of advice about the need for nimbler tactics amid COVID-19, with events delayed by restrictions and subject to last-minute cancellations. For many, efforts have centred around increasing scatter market spend for performance campaigns to buy ad space nearer to programming, rather than via traditional upfronts. But pandemic pressures have also seen some switch attention from content context to focus more on who ads reach.

This shift has tallied with rising diversification of TV activity, enabled in large part by ongoing CTV evolution — including greater focus on performance-based advertising, as well as brand building campaigns and lower funnel tactics aimed at driving results across online video and social. As increased engagement with digital content and live streams has delivered better audience insight, TV’s addressable capabilities have grown, opening up opportunities for advertisers to not only reach more refined viewer segments, but also select media placements with the highest likelihood of hitting specific KPIs. In the face of pandemic budget pressures, the scope this varied approach offers for higher ROAS, and overall efficiency, has made it particularly appealing.

The problem, however, is that audience targeting goalposts are continuously shifting. As well as the common issue of unscheduled break patterns, OTT streams often experience sudden spikes at unpredictable times, and from a diverse set of viewers. Consequently, even the most carefully laid data-based targeting plans can go awry if the makeup of fans streaming particular events changes unexpectedly on the day.

Bringing more flexibility to ad schedules

Controlling live action isn’t feasible, but there is room to bolster advertising adaptability by improving coordination between systems. Conventional broadcaster approaches to linear OTT scheduling and ad break implementation have long provided little flexibility — making it difficult to achieve synchronisation with programmatic mechanisms. This limits scope for the dynamic ad decisioning and serving needed to stay aligned with unfolding sports events.

Technological innovations, however, are opening up ways to overcome efficiency barriers. For instance, the Smart TV booking APIs are enabling broadcasters to automatically import schedules into ad platforms without changing intricate workflows, allowing them to identify which slots are adjustable and increase availability of addressable inventory. Combined with predictive modelling developments, these advances are poised to fuel a major leap forward in ad break management that will bring enhanced guarantees in terms of delivery and yield.

Using newly accessible scheduling data, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI + ML) tools can leverage historic information to make accurate predictions about key factors for specific sports events, including audience size and composition. This insight paves the way, not only for pre-selection and purchasing of media — similar to upfronts — but also more efficient programmatic buying and targeting.

Where is dynamic delivery headed?

For marketers, the main upshot is the expanded opportunities for data-powered live campaigns. But, in particular, it will be worth watching out for two options: single and multiple advertiser slot optimisation (SASO and MASO).

Also known as creative versioning, SASO (Single Advertiser Spot Optimization) will allow buyers to replace one ad with another in the same slot. Tapping individual and household-level data, they can match ads for better relevance. Meanwhile, MASO (Multiple Advertiser Spot Optimization) primarily benefits sellers — enabling them to swap in creative from varied buyers in line with what suits their current audience — but it also stands to benefit buyers by increasing capacity for open real-time bidding on specific ad space.

With events only recently recovering from 2020’s hiatus, we’re just now seeing the full effects of digital-first engagement on sports. The evolved live event advertising landscape offers huge reach across self-selected – and potentially even more valuable – audiences, as well as granular audience activation and targeting. There are certainly plenty of reasons to get back in the game, and the marketers and broadcasters who move fastest will take pole position.

This has several implications for Sky Media, the Sky sales house that represents all Sky channels, third-parties including ViacomCBS and has addressable TV partnerships with the UK’s other biggest sales houses, ITV Media (ITV) and 4Sales (Channel 4). “The first opportunity is that every piece of content on Glass can be addressable,” Patrick Béhar, Chief Business Officer at Sky Media, pointed out at The Future of TV Advertising last month. This is helped by the fact that recordings are stored in the network.

“Suddenly you move from a world where only a portion of the content is targeted to one where everything is targeted advertising,” Béhar continued. That is important because targeted inventory has higher CPMs.”

Sky Glass will enable faster in-flight optimisation of campaigns because the data will be available faster, the Sky executive continued. “That is something our [content and advertising] partners are interested in.”

Shoppable advertising (where consumers can buy brands/products they have seen in shows, directly through the TV) should be easier on this platform, he reckons, and Béhar hailed the brand safety of this Smart TV environment.

Automatic content recognition (ACR), where a television recognises what someone watches through the pixels hitting the glass, is not required, Béhar said, as Sky knows what people are watching through their direct, opted-in, GDPR compliant subscriber relationship.

Sky Glass and its all-digital delivery of television will not influence how much advertising will be sold programmatically or made available for self-serve buying systems, either. Béhar made it clear that these features are platform-independent for Sky.

Sky “is going to push the boundaries of what television advertising does” using Sky Glass, and the company is discussing the possibilities with channel partners like ITV and Channel 4, he told the London conference.

Editor’s Comment

When it comes to advertising, one significant potential change created by Sky Glass is that Sky will gain priority access inside at least some ‘free-to-air’ homes in the same way that other Smart TV makers have. This would probably apply to only a small subset of Sky Glass homes, so the market opportunity depends on how many Sky Glass sets are sold.

As you can read separately, consumers buy the Sky Glass television set outright or using monthly installments across 2-4 years, yet the Sky television subscription is on a month-to-month contract. This presents the possibility that consumers take the TV content/aggregation package with Sky Glass but later unsubscribe, leaving them with a different relationship – where Sky is ‘just’ a television set provider to that home.

Smart TV makers who sell devices but not content, like Samsung, are already curating free-to-view, ad-supported streaming services and offering ad sales for those channels/services. In theory, if a household ends its Sky content/aggregation subscription, Sky could take up a similar role – representing free-to-view content owners that are not sitting behind a Pay TV subscription wall.

There is no suggestion that Sky will pursue this as an opportunity, but when asked if it was of interest, Béhar declined the chance to trash the idea. He simply said: “There is a market for free-to-air [broadcast] plus streamers [as witnessed in most Smart TVs on the market, where these content groups are both presented via the user interface].”