He continues: “In AVOD you obviously cannot just infinitely increase your ad loads, but you need to make more money – how? In-content is really the green field where you can go. Everyone who operates an SVOD service needs to rely on subscriptions, and is happy to make more money. The advantage of what we do is that it really works in every environment.”

Mirriad deploys it’s AI technology – SceneFinder – to analyse thousands of hours of video content and to identify contextually relevant moments where brands can appear within the programming itself, either in the form of product placements or poster/billboard ads. The technology then inserts the brand virtually, post-production. Mirriad is also fully addressable, with the ability to serve by audience, device, geography and platform. Beringer remarked that the company is working towards achieving programmatic activation this year.

According to data from Kantar, ad awareness among viewers exposed to Mirriad ads was 20 percentage points higher than for those who were not exposed, with brand affinity and purchase intent also higher by ten percentage points and seven percentage points respectively.

Beringer cites data from Nielsen which shows that 23% greater reach on average is achieved through in-content advertising compared to the reach of ads placed in adjacent spots to the same programming. “And that’s the average”, he continues, “We’re seeing campaigns which have 45-46% more people being reached.”

Beringer explains that these differences in reach and other KPIs is due to viewers being engaged in the programming they are watching, but typically tuning out or going to complete  small domestic tasks during ad breaks.

In addition to boosting reach and driving business outcomes, Beringer argues that viewers prefer the ad format significantly over traditional ad spots. Kantar data shows that there is a 6X preference for the company’s ad format, with 80% of viewers saying they liked Mirriad’s ad formats and a further 83% saying Mirriad ads integrated well with the content they are placed in.

Beringer believes that in-content advertising allows service providers to monetise their libraries of content, while simultaneously enabling advertisers to access untapped attention, relevance and reach without overwhelming viewers with ads.

He says: “You want to watch a YouTube video, for instance, and you’re forced to watch one or one-and-a-half ads, and after a few minutes you’re interrupted again with a mid-roll. The same happens of course when you turn on broadcast TV. In the U.S., out of one hour of content, 25% is consumed by ads – which is an incredible amount. It feels like you’re bombarded with ads.

“Our paradigm is the opposite. We go into the content and by doing so we’re opening this massive new market and giving content owners the ability to monetise the content that they have and distribute.”

He argues that the ad format can even reach viewers watching TV in SVOD environments without alienating them, through a “fusion of content narrative and story-telling, and brand narrative and story-telling.” He elaborates that, in real life, ads surround us constantly as we move about the world and therefore ads can appear realistically in content without seeming jarring.

He notes however, that it is important not to negatively impact users’ viewing experience by over-saturating programming  with in-content ads. He says: “Our systems are drilled to avoid exactly that, and content owners have no interest in over-polluting the content, either.

“If you start doing things which are inappropriate from a contextual standpoint, the viewer will react negatively and the consequence is that the impact for advertisers is not great. No one has an interest in doing something that is detrimental to the viewing experience.”

The platform is also equipped to ensure brand safety. Advertisers can specify contexts or emotional registers which they do not wish their brand to appear in, and the AI technology will avoid placing the in-content adverts within those environments.

Beringer gives the example of an alcoholic drinks brand: “You will want to exclude scenes with children. You will want to exclude driving scenes that come within several scenes after the ad placement. You can programme the system to exclude these scenes because you don’t want to have a bottle of whisky in an environment where there are children playing. You don’t want that as an alcohol brand and you don’t want that as a broadcaster.”

According to Beringer, Mirriad’s global inventory currently represents 82 billion impression media opportunities.

Rhys McLachlan, Director of Advanced Advertising at ITV, gives the example of advertising alongside food-related content: “If you are a food advertiser, you’re not just going to advertise beside food programmes. We have 24 food-related programmes but food, or meal times, as they appear across the entirety of ITV’s programming estate, are actually represented thousands of times. So we are using machine learning to understand when those meal times occur and what’s been served [in the content] – is it pizza? Burgers? Spaghetti Bolognese?

“We’re able to create advertising breaks for advertisers adjacent to that concept, unlocking what we’re calling ‘next generation contextual targeting’ using metadata already inherent in the content we have.”

The new product has been tested in market for six months and  ITV is “delighted” with the feedback it has received about its performance.

McLachlan revealed that Planet V has onboarded almost 1,300 users [meaning TV buyers], with most of them being monthly active users. The broadcaster has converted the entirety of its digital video billing system to Planet V, and does not take direct orders [for digital video] anymore. To illustrate the range of businesses using the platform to advertise across ITV’s programming he brings up several recent examples, including a chain of tanning salons across Stockport, solicitors firms in Birmingham, and a glass fitting company in Glasgow looking to amplify its proposition by advertising to customers within a certain drive time of where it is located. He says: “Everything is going through Planet V. We have thousands and thousands of advertisers – our run rate is ridiculous – and we’re driving into new markets as well.”

Speaking briefly about ITVX – ITV’s forthcoming streaming service – McLachlan believes the new offer will “revolutionise” the broadcaster’s business. We’re fully re-imagining ITV’s streaming proposition and it’s going to knock your socks off.”

McLachlan believes that broadcasters are at risk of collectively failing if they cannot compete with digital native businesses that have innovation “hard-coded” into their DNA. He argues that broadcasters do not compete with each other so much anymore, but with companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and TikTok that have codified “disruption, agility and a hacker mindset” into developing their advertising products.

He comments: “They could move much faster. They had much greater dexterity, and were able to work with greater confidence around risk – around unknowns.” According to McLachlan, until recently ITV had not succeeded in significantly tapping into the discretionary budgets allocated to advertisers to spend on innovative ad products, but over the last two years the company has been “quietly moving innovation into the beating heart” of its business.

He notes that around September 2021, the broadcaster had put into place a process which allowed it to codify its “innovation journey” into an ad labs proposition, developing a group of teams that have the designated responsibilities of delivering innovation across the entirety of the company’s estate. The broadcaster has been reviewing its systems, data, processes and tech stack, and developed a set of concepts that went through a rigorous assessment phase – from ideation through to concept, then to pilot and on to a beta protocol that clients can participate in.

McLachlan says: “The world is crying out for more progressive solutions that allow broadcasters, advertisers and agencies to avail of the richness of the ecosystem in which we now operate.

“This is how we win. This is how we re-frame what TV is about when the ecosystem is changing so quickly and other businesses are trying to muscle in on our territory. This is how we fight back, and we’ll be more effective if we do it together.”

She said: “Unless you are a very specific advertiser, you can’t build scale [through targeted CTV campaigns]. We have got to collaborate more. If you are a big brand advertiser, you’ll be using this as reach extension…and that comes back to needing centralised measurement, and being able to buy from one point in the same way across all different sources.”

She also believes that the costs associated with buying addressable spots on quality CTV inventory is a large barrier for some mass market brands. Coteman elaborated: “Why some mass market brands haven’t been leaping on the CTV bandwagon is about CPMs and CPTs – on [linear] TV, historically, they’ve been paying quite reasonable CPTs. Quality CTV inventory is much higher priced.”

Coteman was joined on the panel by Chris Edwards, Director of Business Development – EMEA at Rakuten Advertising, Paul Gubbins, VP of CTV Strategy, Publica, and Jaidev Kakar, Director of Advertising Solutions, CTV & OTT at PubMatic.

Gubbins argued that when search and discoverability functions for the AVOD/FAST space improve, viewers will spend more time within that ecosystem: “That’s when we get inventory liquidity and that’s when we start to get to a particular point around scale when it becomes really attractive for those big linear advertisers to transition from those traditional environments into addressable environments.”

Kakar said the low cost of programmatic buying has opened up space for certain direct-to-consumer and local brands to advertise on connected TV. He said: “We’re seeing studies which show – probably because of the type of content or audience or because they have more local reach – that when [these DTC and local brands] buy with broadcasters there’s more mass, but there always seems to be around six times greater ROI through programmatic than linear.”

He suggested that smaller brands may be better positioned to see their ROI from advertising on CTV while larger brands will find it more difficult, needing to conduct more econometric modelling to see the effect of advertising on the platform.

Agreeing with Coteman about the challenge posed to CTV by measurement, Gubbins noted that brands are struggling to measure their reach holistically across a growing number of AVOD and FAST services. In particular, he believes ‘legacy’ linear advertisers may only now be starting to test advertising on BVOD and only because they can still apply traditional TV measurement practices in that environment.

While Gubbins does not believe there is adequate cross-platform measurement yet, he thinks initiatives such as C-flight and Project Origin can help advertisers try to understand incremental reach, attribution and frequency management when they plan and buy in TV environments.

Gubbins goes on to predict that measurement for CTV will differ from measuring traditional linear. He remarked: “Traditional TV has taken a panel-based approach to measurement. With the evolution of addressable TV and connected TVs that are plugged into the internet, it’s now more about impression-level measurement. The way we’ve historically measured for traditional TV may not be the way we do it moving forward because fundamentally – while it’s still a big screen TV in people’s living rooms – the delivery mechanism is very different to what it was maybe 15-20 years ago.”

Edwards registered his belief that there will be a universal approach to CTV measurement which the trade consolidates around, but there may be a long way to go before this is achieved.

Another issue which the panelists believed was important to support further monetisation of free connected TV, is achieving a “linear-like” quality to ad breaks in the AVOD/FAST space.

Coteman described broadcast linear ad breaks as “best practice” and highlighted some of the challenges CTV faces in trying to emulate linear. She said: “What people don’t understand is that it’s really difficult to run a streaming product. You’re trying to integrate lots of different proprietary and third-party pieces of technology that don’t all speak to each other properly, and not everyone has thought of every part of the process – especially when you’re approaching it from the broadcaster perspective. We’re at a stage where we’re all learning and developing and therefore, unfortunately, some viewers aren’t receiving the best service.”

Gubbins elaborated on these technical challenges, noting that AVOD/FAST services are relying on programmatic trading to monetise their ad-break, but that each of the different SSPs that participate in a programmatic auction for a slot within a publisher’s ad  break may be responding to that publisher in a slightly different way. This will often mean that bidders may not include the IAB category of the brand, or the name of the advertiser, which results in viewers sometimes seeing the same ad back-to-back in the same ad pods.

He said: “If advertisers can’t manage basic things – such as frequency and competitive ad separation – like they’ve been doing for the last 50 years on linear, they will spend their money with another streaming service that can provide structured ad pods.”

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).

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.”