Advertising

The UK broadcaster has been giving more details about its future advertising strategy, which includes more resources to support agency planners and a determination to talk more directly with clients. The focus is on business outcomes and deeper partnerships. Broadcast linear addressable has been de-prioritised, with ITV Hub now the focus for TV targeting. The company thinks the TV industry should talk more about its short-term impact for brands, as well.

GroupM has just published its annual commentary on ‘The State of Video’ and it paints a confused picture of simultaneous decline and renewal, with audiences down but prices up, youngsters down but older viewers more attractive, measurement insufficient, but digital less trusted, linear effectiveness undiminished but ROI under-valued. Given the emerging priorities for media buyers, however, TV has reason to be optimistic, but it has to double-down on its advertising transformation.

The ‘Ad-Tech Start-Up of the Year’ competition is back, hosted at Future TV Advertising Forum. Companies who are helping to evolve video/television advertising can present their solutions to a panel of industry leaders, in front of an international audience encompassing media owners, agencies, brands and other data/tech vendors. The competition is free to enter.

Discovery says it received very positive feedback from industry stakeholders for its first-of-a-kind efforts to capture ‘Total Video’ consumption during the Winter Olympic Games, and views the initiative as a springboard for more work on multiplatform audience measurement. The channel owner showed audience aggregation across all touchpoints, from viewing time down to social media likes and shares. “Unquestionably, we were able to provide a much more comprehensive representation of how many people across Europe are interacting with the Olympic Games,” the company confirms.

The media and entertainment data analytics firm, 605, has launched an attribution and planning optimisation tool that directly links households to TV advertising exposures, brand awareness and favourability, and purchase activity. One of the benefits of ‘The 605 Impact Index’ is the way it exposes ‘top-of-funnel’ metrics in a scientific manner, often before they can influence sales. Survey data has been industrialized, so it is regular, benchmarked and consistent. Walmart is among the brands that have dramatically optimised their media plans using the solution.

The UK commercial broadcaster has been exposing test consumers to advertisements that are directly relevant to scenes in shows that preceded ad breaks. The company is using AI to find ‘contextual moments’ that convey positive sentiment around a subject or category of product, like a tablet. Consumers who were exposed in this way had 101% better ad recall then a control group.

TotalTV from dataxu is the productised version of an audience discovery and media planning solution that is at the heart of Sky AdVance. It enables audience-based buying, with classic linear, addressable and connected TV pooled into the same inventory ‘pot’ and integrated into a unified media plan. It allows media owners to target audiences in digital and TV on behalf of clients. TotalTV is now available, and could also be adapted for use by agencies.

TVSquared acquired wywy and its automatic spot detection technology last year so it knows when an ad has been aired. Advertisers provide website, app, call centre and store activity data. The company filters out base-level online traffic, takes account of the weather and judges the impact of other media. The result is an assessment of what value a TV campaign delivered, and how you can optimise spend next time.

As part of Comcast, FreeWheel can work more closely with Comcast Technology Solutions towards a more holistic view of total content monetisation. Content could be switched between subscription and ad-funded, and between SVOD, TVOD and AVOD, depending on what works best at any given time. The run-up to a tennis tournament could be made freely available with advertising, while the event coverage itself goes behind a pay wall, as one example of how flexible the transitions could become.

There are occasions, like for ‘tentpole’ live sports events, when it could make sense to replicate the broadcast advertising breaks on the digital (multiscreen) simulcast. Baked-in ads may not raise any revenue, yet if you use a traditional ad server it will make its own decisions on what ads to place and where. FreeWheel has found a way to serve and monetise digital ads on an impression-by-impression basis while keeping the linear ad schedule intact, and this is just one part of a larger vision to unify digital and broadcast.