The Many Facets of OTT and Its Expansion – A BIA Webinar Explores the Landscape

OTT has been a hot topic, made even more so by the fragmentation of television and the advancement of streaming options. To better understand the current OTT market and its expansion, Mitch Oscar, Director of Advanced TV Strategy at USIM and Rick Ducey, Managing Director, BIA Advisory Services, presented a panel of experts last week that included Kemal Bokhari, GM, Data and Analytics at Dish, Jessica Daigle, VP Sales Intelligence at Tegna, Nelson Ferreira, Senior Director, Regional Sales at Gamut, Justin Fromm, Head of Research at LG Ads, Phil Herring, VP Digital Strategy at USIM, Jo Kinsella, President at TVSquared and Adam Noble, Director of Product Marketing at Advanced Video.

The Challenges and Opportunities in OTT

OTT is not without its challenges. For Ducey, the biggest challenges to OTT today are, “Fragmented inventory, cross-platform measurement of linear TV + OTT, frequency capping and applying linear TV business rules using pods, pod positions, brand separation, brand safety, etc.”

But according to Noble, “OTT is not as hard as we think it is and as many perceive,” and while, ”there is a lot of disruption in the industry, any new method of reaching viewers is going to create new opportunities for advertisers in the industry.” Owners can now go direct to consumers, there is a splintering of buying opportunities and channels and the replacement of certain hardware such as set top boxes facilitates the convergence of linear with digital. There are also many new competitive entrants into the space like Pluto TV, “which gives consumers the option to view for free.” All of this impacts the business model.

“Confusion is driven in large part by fragmentation,” he noted. This confusion drives the need to sort through ownership of data, the coordination between services for a seamless advertiser buy and the lack of measurement standardization. “Who has the right to sell what inventory,” he queried, and how can it best be measured?

Yet, a myriad of opportunities abound in OTT. Ducey listed, “Converging the power of digital targeting, workflow, optimization, attribution with the power of premium OTT video combined with linear TV at scale.”

The Importance of Incremental Reach

For Daigle, “Fundamentally, OTT was formed to fulfill a promise of bringing together what I like to think of as digital superpowers of measurement, targeting with the magic of sight, sound and motion. That is why attribution, measure-ability, reach extension, etc. are so critical.” She added that the stakes are higher as clients are demanding more.

Ferreira agreed that, “Brands are demanding more of us, especially in local where it is harder to measure and define those attributes. That challenge is even more challenging.” To that end he is working with clients on solving for reach extension through frequency capping and recency capping.

Television’s overall value is unsurpassed in the marketplace. Fromm explained that, “TV remains one of the most if not the most important medium for many advertisers,” in both national and local. “It also enables tremendous reach in a short period of time. But linear viewing has changed drastically over the last decade or so.” This reduction in viewing underscores the need for reach extension in the OEM universe. “Reach extension is certainly something we are thinking about and the OEMs are well positioned to do.”

According to TVSquared’s recent survey on CTV engagement, Kinsella noted that, “the main reason for advertising on streaming was incremental reach. The people that we surveyed 70% cited the ability to extend reach and engage with audiences beyond linear was why,” they advertised on CTV. She added that, “17% said that understanding deduplicated and incremental reach across streaming platforms is their biggest barrier from fully leaning into streaming.” She advised that we have to be cognizant of the walled gardens and OEMs. “Most of the time they can only measure their data, their piece and more and more, marketers need to be able to measure everything.”

Bokhari noted that reach extension is, “an important part of the advertiser’s strategy to continue to maximize their reach for their ad. What we have done at Dish is to utilize our addressable technology, our viewership data to be able to let the advertiser know what their reach was on the Dish platform for that linear ad and then be able to target one-to-one to those household that were either missed, not exposed to that ad or who were underexposed and create a plan to maximize their reach.”

From the agency perspective, Herring explained that, “We are being held more and more accountable for the media we purchase on behalf of our clients. So while it is hard to make a one-size-fits-all statement when it comes to reach extension, it depends on the campaign, I would say the majority of campaigns, reach extension is important especially in the CTV space.”

The Future of OTT

The Future of OTT is bright. Ducey concluded that three years from now, “In local OTT, BIA is forecasting nearly 2x the ad spend we’ll see in 2021. I suspect we’ll adjust that to be both sooner and higher as time goes on. The industry is working toward an environment where impressions-based trading, measurement, and attribution will have increasingly less friction in cross-platform (linear TV + OTT) activations. I see linear for reach and OTT for targeting and extension to reach non-linear audiences. Linear and OTT will make a formidable 1-2 marketing punch in local video.”

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com

 

The Business of Esports

Where can you find a highly engaged young audience? The answer is, not surprisingly, in gaming and esports. But the business of gaming and esports is more surprising as this content form is growing in acceptance and value for marketers. BIA sponsored a panel discussion, moderated by Zach Oscar, Consultant for Hocus Focus, on the State of Esports and Gaming in 2021.

Esports Landscape

In the Video Game ecosystem, there are Publishers who develop the game itself and the strategies to take the game to market. These companies include Tencent, Apple, and Sony Interactive. There are the Games themselves which is a $180billion worldwide revenue industry and growing. Currently 68% of all U.S. persons 2+ play video games. There are Game Franchises such as Mario and Game Streaming and Streamers who compose the participants and viewers and the overall bucket of esports within gaming which, according to Oscar, are organized live events and streamed digitally showcasing multiple teams and players that are akin to traditional sports, with Leagues, and have reached revenue levels of $1.1billion. For advertisers, these industries offer a rich opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience through sponsorships, native video and product placement.

Esports Audience

Nicole Pike, Global Sector Head of Esports and Gaming at YouGov, noted that, “most people are gamers,” today and that they constitute, “a broad group with lots of nuance.” From her perspective gamers represent the trends that indicate where media is heading. These gamers are, “super-passionate and traditional forms of media are not reaching them,” she added.

For David Tucker, Senior Vice President, Managing Director, US Strategy, MAGNA, gaming and esports is the place to, “reach a vital audience.” He explained that, “There has been a -54% decline in 18-49 in linear TV viewing. Look at the magnitude of figures. Amazon has seen a 73% growth in ad revenue from Twitch.” It is there, he added, where you can find a valuable audience. But advertisers are lagging, he admitted. “There is a big gap in what today’s advertisers think about (gaming) and the amount of spend,” they attach to it.

Covid’s Impact on Gaming & Esports

The pandemic, which has impacted and initially limited the amount of general sports content available to viewers, might have fueled this dramatic increase in gaming viewership. Pike believes that while there has been some impact because of Covid, especially on gaming use hours, growth would have happened anyway. “There will likely be a slowing speed of acceleration,” she explained, but added that this growth was part of an overall trend.  “Covid was the accelerant of a trend that was already in place,” which ramped up what might have been three years of growth into one year. She also believes that, “trends have stickiness,” inferring that the end of the pandemic may slow but not stop this growth.

Nick Barrionuevo, Gaming Partnerships Lead for Samsung Ads, saw a, “footprint spike at the beginning of the pandemic,” then the spike came down to a new plateau and incremental rise.

Gaming & Esports Business

For Barrionuevo, the audience shift to gaming is causing a business shift. Currently, he reported, there is more viewing on streaming than viewing to linear on Samsung TVs. “OTT content is the way to reach gamers,” he stated and added that he is working on ways to serve this audience and reach them where they are.

According to Dave Madden, Executive Vice President, Gaming and OTT, Simulmedia, “Brands have to figure out how to turn these (gaming) environments into marketing opportunities,” because Covid has created a new social structure for young consumers. To that end, he recommended co-marketing partnerships, more like major league sports.

Ultimately, for esports, gaming, and game streaming to fully compete with other media like TV, there have to be a common viewership metric that can be easily comparable. “What is the opportunity cost of moving money to gaming & esports. We need a comparative metric,” Pike stated.

For Oscar, the future of gaming and esports looks very bright. “As a young millennial myself, I can tell you that I have never owned a cable subscription and I don’t really plan on it. However, I can tell you I’ve banked hundreds if not thousands of hours online with my friends in some of my favorite games, watching some of my favorite streamers, and cheering for my favorite esports teams. For me and many others, gaming isn’t a solo activity - it’s how we stay in touch with our social networks. Marketers who are willing to put in the effort and not just stick to the status quo of advertising in traditional formats have an incredible opportunity to reach a great audience and build unique and exciting ways to connect with them,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

Going Local. An Interview with Rick Ducey, Managing Director at BIA

With the continued development in addressable campaigns and cross platform opportunities, national advertisers are now able to choose the best units for their desired consumer targets, even targeting on a local level. 

Rick Ducey, Managing Director of BIA, understands the importance of the local advertising marketplace. BIA offers local market data, intelligence and advisory services for those marketers interested in leveraging the value of local advertising.

Charlene Weisler: Where does BIA fit in the media ecosystem?

Rick Ducey: BIA is data-based consultancy and advisor primarily focused on informing buyers, sellers and solution providers about advertising, technology and business dynamics in the local media advertising market. Our flagship data service is a comprehensive 5-year forecast of media spending across all platforms targeting local audiences in nearly 100 business verticals.

Weisler: Where was the local media market before the pandemic, during the pandemic and at this point in time?

Ducey: As with the general economy, the local media market began 2020 in Q1 on a high note with expectations for increased political spending, increased ad buying based on consumer confidence in the economy, and more data allowing advertisers to better target audience segments, optimize campaigns and show ROI. Then the pandemic hit and all the rules changed. Ad buying was cancelled, paused, reduced and shifted from higher priced and less accountable traditional media to digital media. Overall, the ad market was in decline. There were some regional and business vertical variances. For example, the home improvement and telecom sectors showed strength as the workforce shifted to the new paradigm of home-based offices. And business closures, restrictions, re-openings varied by region and thus so did the demand for advertising by businesses in these regions. As we continue through Q4, especially with recent promise of a COVID-19 offering a 90% efficacy rate, optimism is returning to Wall Street and Main Street about a resurgent economy. We’re seeing upgraded expectations for advertising through the Q4 holiday peak season and on into 2021. The shift of the Summer Olympics to 2021 provides another boost in advertising opportunities.

Weisler: What are the critical elements to keep in mind for local commerce, sales and media at this time?

Ducey: BIA tracks ad spending by all types of businesses targeting local audiences – national, regional and local. There are strong positives for national buyers targeting local audiences in geo-targetable media including the ability to provide the most relevant content, match advertising pressure against brand messaging (e.g., regional product introductions, trying to improve sales in certain geographies, attract new sales or provide stronger competition, etc.). These are benefits national media cannot deliver at scale, especially when leveraging local media brands and trustworthy factors in (e.g., local TV news spots). For local and regional businesses, working with trusted local media outlets is cost-effective and leverages local media brands to their own local brands. The local media industry and the solution providers serving media companies are bringing ever better data, technology, accountability and workflow to the challenge of making the most effective ad investments. Always a moving target. We’re seeing a tremendous growth of interest, activity, spending and ROI in local media and expect it to continue into the future.

Weisler: What are the opportunities of going local?

Ducey: Local media advertising is becoming better informed with more actionable data that informs buying and selling across media platforms to find and activate target audiences and track results. The tech and data are providing better support all the time for key benefits including cross- platform budget allocations, frequency capping, dynamic creative optimization, addressability and attribution. Both buyer and seller teams are becoming less siloed when it comes to investments in traditional and digital media, and that’s where things need to evolve quickly. Just as the audience transits various media platforms in situational and purposed based use cases (e.g., audio in car, large screen TV sets for sports, mobile video for on the go) so too must buyers match their media allocations in smarter and smarter activations to reach and influence these local audiences. There is great opportunity to do so and we’re confident the market is head in this direction by getting smarter, offering new innovations and using data to better inform decisions.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com