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”.

FIFA+ provides sports biopics and documentaries as well as match action and has been expanding globally across connected TV apps and FAST channels. Romy Gai, FIFA’s Chief Business Officer, said: “Sky Media’s expertise and leading capabilities in advertising sales will maximise the commercial success of FIFA+ content, enabling us to create new commercial opportunities.”

Brett Aumuller, Managing Director of Sky Media added: “It’s great to be collaborating with FIFA as they move into the connected TV and FAST channels space. We already provide a wide-ranging football offering to advertisers, and adding FIFA+ will make it an even simpler and more compelling proposition for brands.”

FIFA+ has been well received by consumers in its first year. During the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, FIFA+ generated 190 million views on match recaps.

Editor’s comment:

Advertisers welcome premium streaming services as a way to reach audiences, but also value simplicity when it comes to planning and buying audiences. This deal is a classic example of how an established sales house gives them a direct route into a new audience opportunity. There are many entities ready to represent streamers selling ads. Existing broadcast/Pay TV groups are well-placed to perform that role, as Sky Media has demonstrated here.

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.

The solution enables brands to tailor their campaigns around target locations (from country, county, city, down to the postcode level), as well as the demographics and estimated affluence of the household, and change which content is played for the sponsor media depending on who is watching. For example, Sky Media says that “a car brand could change the car model featured depending on the affluence or life-stage of the household, or change the scenery and voice-over depending on location.”

Smart Sponsorships is powered by the same technology as AdSmart, Sky’s addressable TV solution which launched in the UK in 2014 before expanding to European markets three years later. Sky Media says that brands using AdSmart have seen a 48% reduction in tune-away during ads, a 35% increase in engagement and a 10% increase in spontaneous recall.

Dev Sangani, Advertising Capability and Strategy Director at Sky Media, says: “AdSmart pioneered the use of TV addressability and that same technology will help do the same for sponsorships. With rich data, exciting creative possibilities and trusted and engaging content, this latest innovation will help brands create even more effective partnerships with our shows and channels.”

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].”

Sky Media wants to reward the businesses that are demonstrating true resolve and ingenuity. “Businesses of all types are adapting to the current climate but can further thrive with the extra exposure TV can deliver,” the company says. “From local garden centres delivering flowers and materials for the first time, to yoga and dance studios keeping people fit with new online classes, the businesses that are selected to be part of the SME100 will be representative of the whole of the UK.”

Creative execution of the ads will be supported by local creative agencies and through an exclusive partnership with the media library Shutterstock. Shutterstock will assist the 100 businesses by providing complimentary access to high-quality images, video and music to aid the creative process and effectively tell their story with engaging content. “In doing so, the SME100 and Shutterstock will enable local creative agencies to produce broadcast-ready, 30 second ads remotely and cost-effectively and will bring further investment into local and smaller creative industries,” Sky Media declares.