What is going on with Kayo’s advertising strategy?
Confused by Kayo Ads, Mutiny’s Henry Innis writes about the “biggest mystery” in advertising.
Every Friday, Saturday, or Sunday (sometimes on Thursday) I watch my beloved Manly Sea Eagles.
It’s a long season. Before 2021, I used to catch them very occasionally at the pub. Travel on Thursday and Friday nights usually saw me stuck in an airport lounge, ruing my poor luck and choices as I drudged through the dreaded Sydney-Melbourne commute.
Today, I’m blessed with the wonderful service that is Kayo.
I can’t speak highly enough of it. It’s quick, streams fast and lets me watch live sport virtually anywhere. It’s changed the way I can watch my favourite sport. It’s addictive and often full screen on my TV when I’m (rarely) home.
Glad you’re enjoying your Kayo subscription Henry.
We’re really proud of how fantastic the user experience is. The way our platform is set up is that we run the same advertising experience as our Broadcast feed with Digital only ads inserted inserted over the linear feed, which is partly the reason you’re seeing those pesky holding pages.
Rather than just have a free for all, we adhere to strict frequency caps – so we don’t run back-to-back ads like other BVOD platforms. We cap category and advertisers within ad pods, all to make sure that our subscribers have the best viewing experience possible and that the ads that are run are more engaging and effective for brands.
I can understand your frustration as a media professional – we often have to hold ourselves back and remind ourselves that Kayo is a premium Live sports platform – both in terms of the content, and the advertising environment. We don’t compromise on this. We’d rather serve you a holding page than a frustrating ad experience.
Please be patient with us as we increase our advertiser volume, part of the challenge is keeping up with the exponential growth of Kayo over the past year. We’re currently delivering 28.5% of total BVOD minutes on a monthly basis with our subscribers watching 8+ hours of sport weekly. As we continue adding more advertisers to the platform, you (and other viewers) will be seeing fewer instances of holding pages, and more awesome ads.
Always happy to chat to you directly if you want to learn more about advertising on Kayo – just buzz me on LinkedIn if you’d like to connect.
Well, I think more brands should be on Kayo then! Thanks for the response, I think it’s a testament to you guys that you’re capping for UX purposes. That’s customer centricity right there.
I’m not sure what’s worse, we’re in an ad break or seeing the same ad 3 times in a row. What I’ve noticed though is that ads in the same stream can differ by device. I’ve had the same kayo stream playing simultaneously live on a shield and a Chromecast google tv and it showed different ads in the same break