By Christophe Kind, Director Market Development, Video Advertising, MediaKind
As the world of TV and media continues to head full throttle into the digital era, TV advertisers can tap into the full potential of internet-based delivery to reach consumers in new and dynamic ways. The growing number of streaming-based Direct-To-Consumer and TV Everywhere multiscreen services offered by broadcasters and operators enable advertisers to shift from traditional ‘one-to-many’ to ‘one-to-one’ session-based conversations with targeted audiences in a high-value premium TV environment.
Conviva’s Q4 2020 State of Streaming report found that time spent streaming spiked 44% globally between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020. This surge was more prominent in Europe, which tallied 122% growth over the same period. Flexible, shared experiences are of greater significance to consumers now more than ever, and media companies have an opportunity to deliver highly personalised and relevant content to differentiate their services.
The media industry has been increasingly turning to new monetisation opportunities which can accommodate and embrace the growing demand for personalised and relevant video experiences. As the cost of content rights continues to grow steadily and content digitisation becomes increasingly pervasive, maximising revenues from every potential viewer is essential to media businesses. Managing these challenges – including the complexities surrounding content distribution negotiations – requires media content companies to find innovative ways of delivering high-quality content to viewers. This nuanced approach becomes possible thanks to robust, first-party data gathered from long-standing relationships established with end-users.
Hitting the bullseye with targeted advertising
As over-the-top (OTT) video services continue to dominate consumer viewing preferences, programmers and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) must find new monetisation methods through targeted advertising.
Server-side dynamic ad insertion helps broadcasters and service providers to effectively personalise and monetise multiscreen video services across all types of media services, including linear, OTT, and streaming. Analysing consumer profiles while complying with privacy protection regulations enables TV operators and service providers to better understand their audiences’ behaviour and the type of content that different segments regard as premium.
By embracing a more personalised advertising offering, broadcasters and service providers can retain much better control of the content they deliver to viewers. The distribution of this content can be based on geographic, sociographic, demographic and behavioural data,
enabling new monetisation opportunities for existing inventory and content assets.
To fully tap into this opportunity, media operators and content owners need technology vendors that can help them recognise the full revenue potential of advertising. Advertisers can already leverage tried and tested solutions to obtain a greater level of control and insight, enabling them to provide a more streamlined and cost-efficient means to reach audiences. This is a significant factor for many advertisers today, given the budget restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent disruptive impact on the broader media landscape.
Leveraging media industry standards
The influx of new OTT-based streaming services has caused significant market fragmentation, and MVPDs must continue to find ways of offering natural value-adds to advertisers. For this, global media standards will be critical to the successful management of programmatic advertising workflows. In addition, given the complexity behind handling distribution rights agreements, it will be vital that the industry adopts and supports essential video standards such as SCTE-224, an Event Schedule Notification Interface (ESNI) standard that was was approved by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) in 2015. The standard is now regarded as the most advanced and standardised data model dedicated to distribution rights.
Broadcasters are quickly adopting SCTE-224 as a means to define rights and by operators as a way to enforce them, particularly in the US. Looking ahead, the combination of SCTE-35 (a joint SCTE/American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard) to handle in-band signalling and SCTE-224 for processing out-of-band rules (such as blackout and program substitution) will be fundamental to enabling easy deployments and implementations.
Predicting how audiences will gravitate towards different types of content consumption models is no easy feat. What’s more, as the global health crisis continues to impact traditional TV heavy hitters, such as live sports and reality shows, operators must be primed and ready to react to the shifting needs of consumers and advertisers as quickly as possible.
For operators, understanding their audiences’ preferences and viewing patterns in greater depth than ever before gives them a unique advantage in this space. To capitalise on this, however, they must have the core technology in place and adapt their services in line with the market. As the dynamics of the media landscape continue to ebb and flow, operators and broadcasters must react to the needs of their consumers and advertisers and the realities of a digital world.
