Reach out – I’ll be there….
One of the imperatives for ad buyers in Australia – as in all major markets – is to replace lost linear audiences with new reach that is equally as effective. The proliferation of SVOD services with new advertising tiers, alongside increasingly premium FAST and better BVOD, makes it a realistic ambition to find consumers who have been lost to TV advertisers.
Ad-free is in retreat, it seems; ad-support is the talk of the town. In the words of the Four Tops, just ‘Reach out – I’ll be there’ (maybe).
The ‘trick’ is knowing where to find ad-supported streaming viewers and when, and how to ensure we don’t duplicate audiences with each new streaming buy. We have to understand the value of every streaming service on the plan, and how to aggregate and buy audiences easily across an increasingly fragmented video landscape.
We must target consumers accurately in multiple locations, and integrate audiences into a Total TV (total video) campaign that includes broadcast linear TV and YouTube. We must measure all this effectively in the quest for a single view of the omnipresent consumer (and now decide if that warrants a multi-measurement, multi-currency model!).
The Future of TV Advertising Sydney 2024 is dedicated to performing this ‘trick’ – which in fact represents a transformational achievement that will make TV a better advertising medium in comparison to its rivals.
It feels like we have reached an inflection point in Australian TV, with people seriously discussing [digital] video-first planning. There may be a long road ahead, but we have a line-of-sight to an all-streaming future and can begin to understand what that looks like. And, faced with an ad-supported premium streaming inventory boom, this is a great moment to reach out.
Our key themes for 2024 are:
No prizes for guessing this would be high on the agenda. Foxtel and its Video Futures Collective mean Australia is now the second most interesting TV measurement market on earth after the U.S. – which led the Alt Measurement & Currency revolution. Opinions are divided on whether this is a good thing or not, and we are digging deep into the implications of a multi-measurement/multi-currency marketplace here. Can Foxtel’s vision happily co-exist with VOZ, or is this now a battle to produce ‘the’ single total video currency for Australia? What must everyone do to make this paradigm work if buyers decide they do want currency choice? What are the practical implications for working in a multi-currency environment? You will hear about the future of VOZ, of course, and we will also be investigating measurement of SVOD advertising tiers, and taking a timely look at innovations in deterministic data like ACR and set-top box RPD.
Expect a full review of the emerging premium video landscape, with an emphasis on what SVOD ad-tiers, FAST and better BVOD mean for where audiences will be found and how advertisers can ‘talk’ to them. Does SAVOD (SVOD with ads) offer something unique – a different kind of viewer, or viewing experience, or halo-inducing fandom, or engagement that linear TV or other premium streaming does not? What total and incremental reach will SAVODs deliver to Australian buyers? We want to know if FAST is broadcast linear, only streamed, or if it is AVOD-on-a-schedule, or something completely new. What is its purpose to viewers and advertisers? How much broadcast linear reach replacement will come from broadcasters themselves, and how will they keep engaging younger demos?
There will be a focus on how we turn a fragmented ad-supported television universe – which includes linear TV, BVOD, FAST, AVOD and SAVOD – into a unified whole. With the proliferation of ad-supported streaming adding urgency to this task, we look at planning best practices, including the latest thinking on how to optimise linear-plus-streaming and how to avoid streaming-on-streaming duplication as more digital is added to the plan. Expect discussions on audience aggregation. Tech innovations that help open up premium streaming inventory and make it part of a unified campaign are on the agenda.
The economic environment is challenging and there is pressure on media budgets, so we want to know how TV can help CMOs do more with less – whether it is possible in 2024 to streamline without major sacrifices. At the very least, we want to know how you make a dollar go further in TV/premium video. This investigation could span: Attention benchmarking of media; The role of audience-based cross-platform buying;text; Better alignment of ads to context; Planning efficiencies (and the impact of ditching make-goods).
