Conviva Leadership
Report
Conviva recently launched its State of Streaming Advertising 2021 report, which asked the same questions of advertising buyers and sellers, as well as consumers, to get a snapshot of where the streaming advertising market is today.
To give you the information you need to power your business forward we discussed some of the report’s key findings in our webinar Q&A: The State of Streaming Advertising, with Lynn Leahey, Editorial Director at Cynopsis Media, Chris Murphy, Business Development Director at Conviva, and Josh Sharma, Vice President of Advertising Partnerships at Entertainment Studios.
Finding: 60% of viewers say there are too many streaming ads being repeated in the same ad break.
Why it’s happening: Right now, there are two channels to purchase through: traditional, one-on-one sales channels and programmatic channels where buyers are reliant on partners like supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to facilitate the advertising for their inventory. From a technology standpoint, many ad servers are capable of doing competitive separation, but there’s a disconnect between these two sales channels and how they talk to each other.
What to do: Make sure you have a unified strategy across your digital investment teams and TV investment teams of putting together, transacting, and measuring your media plans.
“The measurement is different. That’s why I think you see the rise of a lot of cross-platform planning and measurement tools to bring the worlds together. Over time, that will be the standard, and the broadcasters that have this new portfolio approach that can unlock different datasets, different measurement sets, different currencies that allow the buy side more flexibility will bring that together a bit more.” — Chris Murphy, Business Development Director, Conviva
Finding: Only 10% of buyers are satisfied with brand safety reporting.
Why it’s happening: The rise of verification came through the web, where a crawler could look at a URL and tell you exactly what was on that page. That technology doesn’t exist in connected TV (CTV). With CTV, the publisher has to empower data companies or themselves to share that information with buyers, so the buy side has less leverage to require this with publishers, who often don’t understand the need for it.
What to do: Become a trusted partner to garner more share of content partners’ budgets.
“We were hearing from agencies and brands all the time about can we at least get post-impression reporting, but our carriage agreements with content providers always restricted us from doing that. We’re actually going into these negotiations with content partners to go hand in hand with our content acquisitions team and let them know how important this kind of data is and to show this transparency.” — Josh Sharma, Vice President of Advertising Partnerships at Entertainment Studios
Finding: Sellers two times more likely than buyers to agree that there’s sufficient data to target inventory.
Why it’s happening: This can be traced to the fragmentation you see on the supply side. When buyers say there’s not enough data available, it matters who is selling it to them. For the same piece of content, there can be multiple parties executing that sale — content owner, distributor, and the glass itself — and all three entities are trying to protect their ad sales. Also, there’s a difference in data sharing for targeting versus measurement.
What to do: Think through exactly what data you need. With targeting, maybe it’s only genre, ratings, or length. But with measurement, it could be at series or even episode level.
“The distribution relationship between content and consumer means there’s different data available for transactions, to plan, to optimize, to measure. I don’t think all content owners have thought through what data they need to run their businesses when they don’t actually own the app on which their content is being distributed.” — Chris Murphy, Business Development Director, Conviva
Finding: Untapped Potentials are a third of viewers, but they’re not watching much streaming and are unhappy with the experience.
Why it’s happening: Ad buffering is the silent killer of engagement. Quality of the experience matters for ads as much if not more than for content. Consumers aren’t going to wait around, especially for an ad to load.
What to do: Rewrite the rules of the ad experience, get off the clock, and drive longer-term engagement with new formats like pause ads or binge ad sponsorships.
“The beauty of our platform is that we’re not really tied to a linear clock. We don’t really have to set a piece of content or a show to end at a particular date or time. So that means we actually aren’t tied to the same type of ad load that you expect in linear TV, which obviously is going to provide for a better user experience, much lower ad load, which hopefully will let the users engage with the content on the platforms a little bit more.” — Josh Sharma, Vice President of Advertising Partnerships at Entertainment Studios
Finding: Less than 30% of viewers felt their privacy was protected.
Why it’s happening: The web is so saturated with ways that publishers and platforms monetize users and provide an advertising experience that the general public has forgotten how the internet is the free internet that we know today.
What to do: Educate the public on what the value exchange is. Consumers have to pay a fee to get the content they want, and if they don’t want to pay a fee, they’ll have to see ads.
“Remind them that they’re getting quality premium content in exchange for maybe a personalized and more relevant ad experience outside of what you’re used to on your normal web browsing or whatever it might be.” — Josh Sharma, Vice President of Advertising Partnerships at Entertainment Studios
To learn more about these key findings and others, watch our Q&A: The State of Streaming Advertising webinar.
