Advertisers are still to catch up with connected TV’s potential, says IAB Australia
Australian advertisers are being presented with a new range of opportunities as connected TVs and over-the-top application drive an explosion in inventory, the Interactive Advertising Bureau claims in its latest white paper.
In its Connected TV: The New Era of Television whitepaper, the IAB found nearly 35% of TV networks’ inventory was available to online services which are being viewed by 82% of Australians.
The paper found smart TVs are declining as a proportion of the market, making up 26% of devices in March 2017 as opposed to 42% at the beginning of 2016. Of the rest of the market, OTT devices such as Apple TV and Google Chrome made up 68% and gaming consoles at 6%.
Advertisers are challenged by the fragmentation of the market, the report stated: “CTV content includes a diverse range of stakeholders, traditional broadcasters, OTT providers, digital video content (e.g. YouTube) which means that a CTV measurement solution needs to be a collaborative process across a wide spectrum of the broadcast and digital media industry.”
Niamh Collins, GM of video at the Nine Network
There probably needs to be more education around the growth of OTT and CTV as a whole and it signals what we’ve saying about consumption patterns changing,” says Niamh Collins, the Nine Network’s GM of video.
“We’ve just hit the 4.2m subscriber mark so we have great insight into what consumers are watching, when they are watching and that helps inform us from the programming point of view, helping us market better and improving the experience overall.”
Hayley Cameron, digital commercial manager at SBS said there was phenomenal growth in the space.
“I think the advertiser spend hasn’t moved there quick enough and we’ve got a lot of back-end work in fixing up ad technology, capture data and sell audience targeted campaigns,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do on those platforms but there’s still an education piece in the market.”
SBS’ experience with the Handmaid’s Tale shows where the industry is heading, believes Cameron: “The story is broadcasters are making decisions not necessarily led by TV now. We had a great show and we made the decision to put it up online before it went to air which was risky but it was because we wanted viewers to see it as quickly as possible.”
Connected TV services have some way to go before delivering targeted audience to advertisers, said Cameron: “We’re about 65% of the way there. When we’re out in the market talking to clients who want to, say, reach a demo or a specific audience or run a programmatic ad or track viewability, we can’t do any of that on connected TVs – that’s just on desktop and mobile.”
Like Nine, SBS has login services which does offer some potential in Cameron’s view.
“I can serve targeted ads on some of those connected TVs but not all of them,” she said.
Vijay Solanki, CEO of IAB Australia, said video is increasingly appealing to advertisers.
“Video is experiencing truly exponential growth with 82% of Australians consuming digital video each month and broadcasters are telling us anecdotally that approximately a third of this consumption is via CTV/over-the-top content.
“Consequently, it isn’t surprising that savvy advertisers are becoming increasingly interested in the CTV proposition and a wide range of content providers are seeing the big screen opportunity.”
The IAB report is available to members through the organisation’s website.
Be interesting to see how 9 are handling this platform, not a great history around monetizing video here – the amount of non-targeted back to back ads I get is insane, and then those that invite you to click but you can’t – seems relatively diluted
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