Alyssa Boyle ( alyssa@adexchanger.com ) covers the TV ecosystem from linear to video and connected TV. She also writes about measurement and data privacy. Her journalistic passions stem from a background in language and translation. She received her B.A. in linguistics and Korean studies from Binghamton University in 2020. When she isn’t writing, she’s probably deep in a history novel or busy performing stand-up comedy.
Slapping a broadcast signal into an over-the-top stream is generally harder than it sounds. But streaming services need to have local news and sports, too. VUit, for one, helps broadcasters create and distribute FAST channels so they can get a leg up in CTV. As streaming platforms seek more content, VUit has been filling that gap. VUit channels tripled in viewership minutes in 2021.
Broadcasters have long been dissatisfied with Nielsen’s panel-based approach. But now, panels are making headlines again as a fresh way to measure streaming and TV consumption. But this time, the TV industry says it’s talking about “calibration panels,” not audience panels.
Livestream shopping is nowhere near as popular in the US as it is in China. In the US, live commerce is less than one percent of US ecommerce, whereas in China, it’s expected to make up nearly a quarter of the ecommerce market by 2023. Livestream shopping could work for platforms and brands in the US – but only if it’s done in the right place.
FAST channels are a good way to channel (pun intended) more viewers into VOD content libraries. Without sign-ins, payment or the burden of deciding what to watch, FAST channels have a lower barrier of entry, and ideally, viewers who find something new they like on FAST will continue watching the series more regularly in VOD.
For women, finding health care treatment relating to sex is hard. But if you’re looking for “seggs,” that’s easy. DTC brands in the women’s health vertical are still stuck relying on algospeak to skirt around social platforms taking down their ads … As if marketing health care products and supplements for women wasn’t hard enough.
We’re about to see a lot more enforcement against dark patterns from the Federal Trade Commission and on a state level. Holding companies to account for using deceptive language that pushes people into sharing their data has largely fallen to the FTC, but now, US privacy laws are starting to mention dark patterns too.
Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, now has 140 million monthly active users across the globe. Waze does serve ads based on real-time location, but the company refers to this as contextual because the ads are based on wherever a given device is in the moment, rather than any meaningful connections or patterns about a particular user.
Regardless of the ongoing debate as to the viability of panels, the TV measurement industry is starting to increasingly rely on automatic content recognition (ACR) data, especially as set-top box data becomes less available. But like any other form of data collection, it’s nicer if you ask first.
Disney+ continues to lose money but gain subscribers. The service is adding an ad-supported tier in just four months, with a US launch date of December 8. Disney+ AVOD will be available for $7.99 a month, the same price as Hulu’s Basic plan, and the current price of Disney+ with no ads. Meaning, Disney will hike the price $3 a month for viewers who want to continue avoiding ads.
Magnite reported 20% year-over-year growth with $137.8 million in revenue for Q2. And its CTV business alone grew by more than double that number (52%). It’s a plateau compared with last quarter’s growth, but Magnite has strong hopes for CTV’s burgeoning programmatic ecosystem.
Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.
Arlo’s first order of business as a standalone company was to pour money into performance marketing to drum up sales, which is what it did for nearly three years. But there was a problem: A lack of brand familiarity. So Arlo launched its first-ever brand campaign on TV, including linear and streaming, with digital and social also in the mix.
Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1% in total Q2 revenue, closing out the quarter with $9.8 billion, $2 billion behind expectations. So it plans to do some belt-tightening of its streaming services. Specifically, it’s HBO Max productions that are getting the cut.
Paramount is just one of many broadcasters juggling its linear (and declining) TV cash cow with a budding DTC streaming biz. Paramount’s total revenue grew 19% year-over-year in Q2 to a total of $7.7 billion. But the growth was primarily attributed to streaming – particularly Paramount+.
Streaming is attracting more and more of TV ad spend. And yet, measurement still hasn’t caught up. But traditional panel-based measurement is far from the only culprit – issues with ad fraud, viewability and audience identification are more prevalent on streaming. That’s why TV measurement needs to be a fusion solution, says Jon Watts, managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).
DoubleVerify’s Q2 revenue grew 43% year-over-year to $109.8 million. CEO Mark Zagorski says the company’s growth is due to both its revenue diversification into new types of advertising and its market position in the verification space, both of which make DoubleVerify “largely agnostic to shifts in ad spend and CPM volatility.”
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the most mature and comprehensive health data protection law in the US. (It passed in 1996.) But does this patient data protection law apply to data-driven advertising and online data collection? The answer is yes and no.
Roku’s total Q2 revenue was $764 million, up 18% year-over-year, but was relatively flat compared with last quarter, when revenue clocked in at $734 million. CFO Steve Louden was probably referring to that plateau when he warned of a TV ad spend hiatus. US advertisers are pulling back in reaction to inflation and supply chain shortages.
Microsoft’s selection as Netflix’s ad sales partner of choice single-handedly set the stage for Netflix’s last quarterly earnings report. But Microsoft hardly brought up the deal at all when it closed out its 2022 fiscal year on Tuesday. It attributes a good chunk of its current growth to its cloud business.
Tremor International has been on a journey to rebuild its biz with assets on both the buy and sell sides of digital media. And with its acquisition of Amobee announced earlier this week, Tremor is now making inroads into linear inventory. Tremor International CEO Ofer Druker spoke with AdExchanger about the company’s plans for its most recent acquisition.
For decades, political advertisers have spent big to promote their candidates on linear television in the weeks leading up to an election. Now that streaming and connected TV are catching up to linear in terms of scale, political advertisers are making budget reallocations that favor CTV across all content types, including sports.
The current web of disconnected clean rooms is like rows and rows of magnets facing the same way, so nothing actually happens. InfoSum announced a new software, Platform Sigma, to try and give its clients a better way to share depersonalized data with each other and their data vendors of choice – which could also help solve for measurement.
Television does drive sales lift, although the impact usually isn’t immediate. Broadcasters have been trying to change that for a long time. Until recently, however, the reality of shoppable TV has lagged far behind the idea. Publishers are busy exploring interactive TV ad formats, from QR codes to clickable overlays – but are advertisers buying in?
Netflix’s biggest hope for its imminent ad tier is increasing revenue not from ads themselves, but by attracting new sign-ups with a cheaper subscription option. It chose Microsoft as its ad sales partner for flexibility in building out the tech, and it hopes new plans for password sharing enforcement will help keep up subscriber monetization, too.
Most marketers agree that digital and social are performance channels, whereas they’re less convinced that performance marketing works on CTV because it’s a less interactive, lean-back experience. But CTV is a lot more like digital than many marketers think, said Jason Fairchild, CEO of TV performance marketing platform tvScientific. “CTV is like digital in that you don’t have to guess at what works – you know.”
Just three months after Netflix surprised the world with the news that it plans to launch an ad-supported tier, the streaming leader has settled on its third-party vendor of choice: Microsoft. But why Microsoft? It wasn’t considered a serious programmatic contender until it acquired Xandr from AT&T (and that deal only closed last month). Still, something made Microsoft stand out from the crowd.
Advanced TV platform Cadent announced a partnership with data provider Tunnl with an eye on what’s known as issue advocacy segments, which are different from general political ad segments. Issue advocacy campaigns go beyond political affiliation and aim to reach people based on the “hot button” issues that voters are concerned with, such as climate change or reproductive rights.
El Pollo Loco began as a small restaurant chain in the 1970s, first in Mexico and later in Southern California. The brand only started leaning into digital ad channels in 2019, and today, it spends half its media budget on digital – a huge portion of which is reserved for TikTok. Last month, El Pollo Loco launched its latest campaign, “Abuela Approved” – its first TikTok-only campaign.
One of the most popular technical solutions to streamline campaign flights on connected TV is server-side ad insertion (SSAI). SSAI is technology that stitches together ads within a video stream before the stream loads on a user’s device. Most of the demand is coming from the explosive growth of CTV, but it can be used in any connected or over-the-top (OTT) video environments, including social.
Did you know Chicken Soup for the Soul now earns its keep primarily from manufacturing food, pet food and … streaming video? That also means Chicken Soup is partaking in the grail quest for cross-device CTV measurement solutions. Its streamer Crackle Plus renewed its partnership with iSpot to enable improved incremental reach through programmatic direct deals.
