The never-ending birth of paid streaming services is great for consumer choice – but not so great for people’s wallets.
Which is why free streaming platforms are picking up steam in terms of viewership numbers. Take Fox-owned Tubi, which just made it on Nielsen’s radar a couple of weeks after nabbing 1% of total TV viewership in the US. (For context, HBO Max is at 1.3%, and Netflix commands 7.3% of streaming viewership, according to these Nielsen numbers.)
But what is Tubi’s ad experience like? To find out, I kicked back this week and watched “Mike Tyson Mysteries,” “Kitchen Commando” and “Extreme Cheapskates” (to the tune of Tubi’s promise that it’ll stay “free forever”).
Setting boundaries
When I tuned in, I expected Tubi’s ad load to be higher than other streaming services simply because it’s free. Services that don’t charge monthly fees lean more heavily on ad revenue to make a bigger buck.
But even free services have to brave the AVOD streaming competition, which means incentivizing viewers to stick around long enough to pay attention, if not money. And that requires not bombarding people with too many ads.
Tubi stuck to between five and six minutes of ads per hour, about a minute more than most of the other streaming services I’ve tried out recently. But hey, it’s free, so the value exchange felt pretty fair.
Plus, Tubi kept the ad load lower for movies. The three-hour horror movie “It Chapter Two” based on Stephen King’s book had only four minutes of ads, and so did the 2021 kid-friendly movie “Tom & Jerry,” which was two hours long. (Oh, the lengths I’ll go for my readers.)
Based on my viewing experience, though, I felt that Tubi could still use a bit of a clean-up in the ad-podding aisle.
Break it up
Tubi sells ads to major US advertisers, such as Instacart, Wendy’s, Carvana, TurboTax, Mazda, Olive Garden, Wayfair, Walmart, Nordstrom, Lexus, Ocean Spray, Charmin Ultra Strong, Progressive and quite a few Procter & Gamble brands, including Gillette, Cascade, Febreze and Olay. Some of these brands ran a couple of different creatives, but there was a handful of commercials that were shown over and over. (One of Instacart’s ads feels permanently stuck in my head at this point.)
Most noticeably on the ads front, though, some of the placements felt jarring in contrast to the content.
For example, a scene in “It Chapter Two” that included domestic violence didn’t feel like the right time to break to an eHarmony ad, let alone include it in that pod at all, because the pairing probably wouldn’t check the box on brand suitability.
Based on my viewing experience, I also thought there were times Tubi placed two competing products too closely together.
After seeing two different Dawn creatives back-to-back, I saw an ad for a Cascade product with the tagline “double the scrubbing power of Dawn.” Sure, both brands are owned by P&G, but why consider one cleaning product after hearing another is better?
And the lack of competitive separation also applied to direct competitors.
I saw back-to-back spots for Dove, a Unilever product, and P&G-owned Olay. These two competing brands of body wash had to duel it out in the same ad pod and probably would’ve appreciated a bit more breathing room.
Forging ahead
But improvements are coming to Tubi’s ad tech stack. The platform launched almost a decade ago, in 2014, so it isn’t new to the streaming space. But it is new to the volume of advertiser demand that probably pushed its integrations with measurement tech vendors this year.
A couple of weeks ago, the streamer announced integrations with two measurement provider alternatives to Nielsen – Comscore and VideoAmp – during its first-ever advertiser conference ahead of this year’s upfront season, coming on the heels of bigger programmer announcements from competing services (with more than 1% viewership).
Better measurement is key to solving for both viewers’ and advertisers’ streaming pet peeves, which include insufficient frequency capping and competitive separation.
Tubi’s steps toward sprucing up its measurement game is also a sign that the streamer intends to compete with broadcasters for a bigger share of upfront commitments for the upcoming broadcast year.
And considering its content library is actively growing with more Tubi Originals and licensed content from Warner Bros. Discovery, it might be in a pretty good position to further grow its advertiser demand, too.
What I want to know is: How much ad spend will Tubi secure during its negotiations with advertisers ahead of the upfront season?
Let me know what you think. Hit me up at [email protected].
