Vevo represents the music labels, and offers a VOD catalogue of 800,000 titles as well as FAST channels, with its content available through multiple platforms including Samsung TV Plus, Roku, Apple, Amazon and also Pay TV platforms like Sky Q. Vevo on YouTube accounts for a large part of the reach for the music-focused programmer. McGurn describes Vevo as a ‘high reach, low frequency’ solution for advertisers, with that characteristic largely a result of how people watch music videos.

“This is what advertisers come to us for: reach extension with moderate frequency,” he declares. “What is interesting about campaigns on Vevo, from advertisers across consumer electronics to film and auto insurance, is that no matter what you buy from us, we deliver the audience, but frequency never reaches above three. That speaks to the diversity of the video offer. For one advertiser, we had to narrow the reach to dial-up the frequency they wanted, but I think it is a better challenge to increase frequency than deal with too much frequency.”

Vevo has rapidly expanded its FAST channel offering and viewers can now find up to 15 of these linear (ad supported) streamed channels on a typical connected TV platform. This is a lean-back, curated experience and because the channels are genre-based (spanning Pop to Hip-Hop, Country and Latino, for example) or decade-based (e.g., ‘80s or ‘90s) advertisers can reach largely different groups of people via each channel. “There is massive incrementality – as much as 95% incrementality,” reveals McGurn, drawing on research that Vevo presented at the IAB NewFronts in New York.

For consumers, FAST is about removing the decisions needed every four minutes on what to watch next, McGurn says. “It is too much work to constantly choose, and with the curated channels you have passive playback and if you don’t like what is on one channel, you can go to another. We can still keep them [the viewer] on the Vevo network. For us, it is also fun. We like being a curator and that is what the music industry expects from us – we are supposed to be promoters of new music and fandom.”

Asked if Vevo would like to be more than an app on Pay TV/MVPD platforms, in the way that direct-to-consumer streamers like Disney and Netflix are being deeply integrated into the home screen content promotions today, McGurn would only say that “we know our content will be popular wherever it sits, but it is not for us to decide how it should be promoted.” He did admit interest in Vevo appearing within broadcaster streaming (BVOD) services, as some broadcasters start to include third-party content. Vevo is not found in any primary BVOD services yet, “but I would see us as a great content addition in that environment.”

Another part of the Vevo ‘pitch’ to advertisers this year is its increasing understanding of context, down to the detail of what appears within scenes in music videos. This is then used to better match advertising to content. The company already offered mood-based advertising (since February 2021, when advertisers could start buying against moods like ‘heartfelt’ or ‘empowering’, for example). Most recently the company added the ability to match advertising creative to the ‘creative’ look-and-feel of a music video.

Colours, and even the beat of music, can be matched to ads. One illustration shown privately used a music beat and colour-feel that fed exceptionally well into an ad for an electric car. This is better seen than explained, but McGurn gives an example that is easy to imagine: you have an ad creative that is half-human and half-animated, and it might match well against the famous Aha video for Take on Me.

With the help of an AI tech partner, Vevo has also processed its entire music catalogue to find every example where a music video contains a brand representation, whether a coke bottle or a Cadillac car. This has been used to create a targeting package where brands can advertise against the content that contains these images. This is part of a second-by-second analysis of each video to uncover and then label elements of interest, whether logos, items or themes. Advertising packages can also be created for videos tagged with the same keywords – and the example given is ‘beach’ and ‘party’ to create a ‘beach party’ viewing hour, with brand sponsorship available.

McGurn admits the AI-enabled video intelligence does not foretell a tectonic shift in the advertising industry – but it does match advertiser desires for advertising UX innovation. He observes that Vevo can invest in this kind of innovation because its content is evergreen. Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns N’ Roses) received approximately 200 million views across the Vevo network last year, as one illustration of his point.

“You could not do this with television shows because everyone watches them and then they’re done, albeit with some later binge viewing. With music videos, we know the viewing and the ad revenues will be the same in ten years’ time, using the same insights.”

Evelyn Rothblum, EVP Advertising, Partnerships & Distribution, Italy and Germany at Sky, emphasised that both Netflix and Disney are great partners for the Pay TV platform provider (which is also a broadcaster and a multichannel sales house). “They are aggregated into our [Pay TV] offer. We want to integrate their content to ensure people find all the content they love. It is great to see new players offering advertising but it will take a long time for some of those services to achieve the same reach as Sky in the UK and also in Italy and Germany.”

Panel moderator Thomas Bremond, SVP & Chief Revenue Officer, International at FreeWheel, (which provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers) wanted to know how we should characterise Netflix within the Total TV marketplace, and if it is viewed differently to BVOD or other AVOD. “Netflix is television,” declared Kelly Williams, Managing Director, Commercial at ITV. “They make professionally produced, long-form content, so they are part of the TV ecosystem. They’ve been around for a while, competing with us for audience, but we also make content for Netflix, so they are a great partner to work with.

“In advertising they will be a competitor, but we are in a great place to compete with them. We have a big linear business with a mass reach proposition combined with a fast-growing addressable proposition, and we make most of our own shows [thanks to ITV Studios] so we have a strong creative offer, with the ability to integrate brands into our shows.”

ITV, Sky, OMD and YouTube were speaking on a panel titled, ‘TV’s Serendipity moment?’, which focused on the evolution of the Total TV marketplace and how the industry offers cross-platform audience scale while also offering simplicity to buyers. Philip Miles, Managing Director, Video & Display Sales, UK for YouTube, highlighted the contribution of his company, including as a platform for hosting content from channel owners (like Channel 4, which started to make its long-form content available on YouTube this year).

“Up to 30 million people watch YouTube on a television set per month in the UK,” Miles declared, adding that “40% of BVOD is consumed off the television, according to Thinkbox research last month.”

He was making the point that “consumers are cross-platform and watch where they want to watch”. Miles confirmed, “We are seeing interesting partnerships with broadcasters – with YouTube as a partner distribution platform.” And on the question of delivering large-scale, cross-platform audiences and making that easy for advertisers, he said, “We have moved into a new phase where we have to think more about converging the world of linear [broadcast] and digital.”

Miles said YouTube can deliver incremental reach for advertisers as viewing patterns change, and has the ability to leverage targeting to drive mid-funnel and lower-funnel objectives. He referenced YouTube Select (which surfaces a diverse mix of content packages called ‘lineups’ that are contextually linked, like beauty & fashion, entertainment, technology, sports, etc.) as a way to create scale for buyers, and he pointed to global reach on the platform and consistency across markets, coming back to the theme of making life simple for buyers.

Bell emphasised the need to understand the differences between screens and platforms and viewer receptivity to advertising in the different environments – pointing out that targeted audiences on smaller screens can be just as valuable as mass audiences on a large television – albeit traded differently. “From a planning perspective, you have to stick to the principle of ‘Who are the audiences and what mindset are they in, and how do you buy into them, and through what platform, and then how do we measure those cross-platform audiences?”

Bremond asked Bell if it is easier to buy from non-broadcaster digital platforms or from classic broadcasters like ITV. “A digital person [within the agency] will say ‘yes’ and a television person will say ‘no’,” she observed.

“The challenge is that everyone is coming up with a better way to buy on their platform and every platform is simple in its own right, but it is not simple to buy across them, and we have to think holistically. Everyone is innovating, but I hope we have reached peak complexity because I need a bit more convergence through DSPs and single points of purchase.”

Williams acknowledged that digital platforms have made it easy to buy video and said ITV is trying to make television easy to buy, pointing to the investment in Planet TV (the ITV programmatic platform built specifically for television, where ITV owns and controls the programmatic value chain). “This is a self-service platform that every agency can use, and it allows them to exploit our first-party data – using clean room technology to match advertiser data with our data in a safe way. We hope that more of the television industry can use this, and we are hopeful that other broadcasters will join Planet V over the next year or so.

“So that’s what we are doing to compete with Disney and Netflix,” he added, referring to a discussion about how these companies are taking their subscription-with-advertising VOD audiences to market and their tech partners.

Williams added: “The big challenge in the next couple of years is convergence, as more television is delivered over IP. For the next ten years we are going to have to play two roles, with linear [broadcast] and addressable [streamed] and we will have to converge the ad-tech and the sales.”

He confirmed that ITVX, which succeeds ITV Hub, is about moving from a catch-up service to a streaming destination [an objective that includes a massive expansion in the catalogue and a focus on streaming-first drama launches], but that ITVX is also about building ITV’s addressable future. “We are trying to build a big streaming audience and ensure it is incremental and does not reduce linear [broadcast].”

Williams added: “Planet V is the front door for addressable and in future it will be the front door for ITV as we converge everything.”

Asked to sum-up the near-term challenges, Williams flagged regulation for public broadcasters in the streaming world, given their value for local culture and independent trusted news, and his particular focus was on prominence – ensuring some privileges in the same way that broadcasters are guaranteed prominence in broadcast EPGs.

Focusing on changes he wanted in the next year specifically, Williams asked for more collaboration among TV providers, using CFlight (the Comcast/Sky led cross-platform measurement solution that Sky, ITV and Channel 4 have now aligned around) as an example of what can be achieved when working together. “We should compete really hard on content and collaborate on technology and measurement,” he told the Future of TV Advertising Global audience in London.

YouTube’s Miles also gave a nudge to any regulators in the room, stating the value of YouTube creators to the UK production sector – with thousands of jobs now involved. “The television future has to include online platforms and online platforms have a really important role to play in supporting creativity in different markets,” he argued.

His one-year horizon prioritises measurement, which he described as critical to the industry. “It is challenging to make sense of this world [of multiple media touchpoints] but we have to commit ourselves to solutions.” Referring to efforts to establish common and comparable measurement between digital and television, he added: “This is one of the reasons we support Project Origin.”

For Sky, Rothblum had earlier noted how it was harder to sell the concept of addressable TV advertising in Germany and Italy because of a focus on linear in those markets. “They are not looking so much for that targeted advertising product on television — it’s more about digital,” she observed, comparing these Sky markets to the UK where her company has helped drive some scale for addressable.

“Italy and Germany are following behind and it is more about educating the market and working with advertisers to show the value. We know there is value, from our experience in the UK.”

And what does Rothblum want to see change in the next year, especially? “I agree that the focus is on measurement. We must also make it easier to buy audiences. There has never been so much great content for consumers to watch, so we must help advertisers and agencies find the audiences that are watching that content, in an easier way.”

Bell at Manning Gottlieb OMD had already listed some challenges during the course of this panel, including the need for two different skill sets to cover linear [broadcast] TV on the one hand and the addressable/programmatic marketplace on the other – and the need to converge those. “But when we do converge those things, it gets really exciting,” she added.  The talent shortage on the AV (television, rather than digital) side of the industry is also a problem, she admitted.

Then there are two priorities for 2023, for Bell, the first of which is solving the measurement challenges [e.g., cross-platform] without losing sight of effectiveness. The second is the continued delivery of content to excite viewers, which means sustaining the creative economy. “I need content to enable mass reach for my clients,” the agency CEO concluded.

Recent cross-platform campaign analysis from InnovidXP highlights how the combination of FOX (with its news, sports and entertainment content) and Tubi will enable advertisers to scale a wide range of desired audiences across content types. It shows the value of ‘Tubi Unique Content Categories’ in building incremental reach, harnessing genre-based environments that are contextually relevant to the advertiser. Findings have shown that, on average, eight out of ten Tubi households cannot be reached with broadcast linear TV. Innovid says buyers will be able to achieve incremental audience reach averaging 75+% when adding a Tubi buy to a FOX linear campaign.

“As more viewers engage with content across multiple screens, it remains vital that we continue to work with our ad partners and provide them with the necessary data and insights that further display the value of converged TV and the engaged audiences and concentrated impact FOX delivers,” says Dan Callahan, Senior Vice President, Data Strategy & Sales Innovation at FOX. “Our partnership with Innovid is another step forward in expanding and delivering cross-platform measurement solutions that further align with our advertisers’ objectives.”

Tyler Fitch, Senior Vice President, Advanced TV & Partnerships at Tubi, adds: “For more than a year, Tubi has been working in lockstep with Innovid to quantify the unique reach that streaming delivers to advertisers beyond linear [broadcast] – providing top TV advertisers with actionable insights. Tubi and Fox have a shared vision to create the optimal environment for advertisers to efficiently reach the right audiences across multiple platforms and screens. InnovidXP brings this vision to life with consistent, accurate and scalable cross-platform TV measurement.”

Jo Kinsella, President, InnovidXP, concludes: “Fox and Tubi are redefining the way advertisers approach TV investments by prioritising analytics that prove the value of converged TV. We are thrilled to support this collaborative effort to unite linear and streaming with cross-platform audience measurement, and we look forward to delivering advertisers the insights and metrics that matter today.”

Tubi is available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand Mexico and a small number of other markets (but not in Europe).

Linear TV is no longer the standalone video content provider. Streaming services are taking big chunks of viewing time away from broadcast television, and YouTube, with its billions of hours of content, is no different. With the rise of CTV predicted to continue, this trend is undoubtedly going to grow – by 2023, it is expected that over 75% of Western European households will be using CTVs.

With this immense growth in Smart TV ownership, and the rising popularity of consuming YouTube content, it’s about time advertisers asked themselves; could YouTube become their greatest asset?

The decline and inflexibility of broadcast TV

 Linear TV has been in decline since 2013. This has been drastically apparent for the younger generation (aged between 16-34) which has seen a loss of around 60% of viewing from 2013 to 2021. Yet somehow, according to a Comcast report, advertisers should still be looking to use a minimum of 70% of their budget on broadcast television?

Despite an obvious downward trend in consumption of broadcast TV, many advertisers are yet to get ahead of the curve and are still spending big bucks on traditional TV advertising that could be redistributed among other channels to yield a greater return on investment.

Broadcast television has far less choice when it comes to content than YouTube. Whilst there may be multiple channels, each with plenty of shows, this is still dwarfed by the overwhelming amount and diversity of content on YouTube.

This equates to far less flexibility and accuracy in terms of audience targeting for advertisers. Ultimately broadcast TV has a wider audience range in one place, so whilst advertisers might be reaching big numbers, they have very little way of knowing if they are reaching the right audience. Which in turn will lead to lower engagement, and a lower return on investment.

Whereas services such as YouTube have a range of channels and content, all of which come with a niche and focused audience. This allows advertisers to be much more accurate with their targeting and makes their budget stretch much further.

The rise of CTV

CTV provides advertisers with a plethora of opportunities. With 68% of individuals in the UK having access to Smart TVs in their households it must be apparent to advertisers that maximising their CTV advertising will allow them to reach a wide audience.

The number of CTV apps available on the Roku Channel Store, Apple TV OS App Store, and Amazon Fire TV increased by over 38% year-over-year in 2020. This provides advertisers with a wide array of content and services to choose from, allowing them to pick those that align most with the objectives of a single advertising campaign – advertisers no longer need to settle for hitting unnecessary audiences just to reach one demographic on broadcast TV. The opportunity to diversify, and target a specific audience, combined with the increase in popularity of Smart TVs demonstrates why CTV must be seen as a potential primary advertising outlet.

YouTube & CTV – the dream team

When you combine CTV and YouTube, you create the perfect advertising partnership. YouTube’s popularity is continuing to rise, the platform represents 26% of daily video consumption for young people aged 16-34 compared to only 20% for commercial broadcast TV. However, YouTube isn’t just for the young. According to Ofcom in Q1 2021, the total number of YouTube videos viewed by UK online adults was 22% higher than in Q1 2020.

Alongside the reach that makes this combo successful is the flexibility and targeting YouTube provides advertisers. Brands can easily, and successfully diversify their audiences or target a specific group on YouTube due to the vast number of content creators on the platform. Inclusion lists can be created so that brands can reach diverse audiences with their content, and support a diverse range of creators. In a time where social responsibility is key to many brands, using YouTube advertising and inclusion lists means advertisers can add deeds to their words. Significantly, YouTube Ads on CTV drive a 10% greater lift in recall than ads on Linear TV [9] –proof that this combination works!

YouTube and CTV are evidently the advertiser’s dream team. Their increasing popularity and the opportunities they provide in terms of audience engagement and targeting make them a must-have for all brands. To drive home key brand messages, support audiences and of course maximise ROI, advertisers need to be rethinking their budgets and putting great emphasis on CTV.

Other references:

1/ Google/Media Science Lab study, 12 ads, 432 participants. Platforms included: YT OTT, Linear TV. US, November 2018. Google/Media Science Lab study, 12 ads, 432 participants. Platforms included: YT mobile, YT desktop, YT OTT, Linear TV. US, November 2018.