Analysis

There is no doubt we are at the tipping point in the long transition from all-broadcast to all-streaming and Videoscape Europe, the thought-leadership event for premium streamed television, is focused on what this means for Media & Entertainment strategies. The conference is focused on digital transition, seizing the global growth opportunity, next-generation content discovery and engagement, and how we successfully replicate the free-to-view model in the streaming space. Confirmed speakers include NBCU, ITV, Struum, Twitter, ViacomCBS Networks International, Revry, Rakuten Advertising and Foxxum.

Imagine an SVOD service that was called ‘Not Netflix, Amazon or Disney, but everything else’ and hosted content from the next 300 most important SVOD services in a market, with the ambition of being the fourth VOD destination everyone goes to. Your monthly subscription is converted to credits that can be used to view content assets from any of the partners. That, in a nutshell, is Struum, a service that launches in the U.S. this spring with nearly 40 SVOD partners already signed up. And the company intends to go global.

Media researcher Professor Karen Nelson-Field tells Michaela Jefferson about her new attention-focused media planning tool and why it could transform the way media is bought and sold. AttentionTrace, shuns "meaningless and non-universal" metrics such as shares, likes, followers and even OTS. Instead, it demonstrates active and passive attention and normalises this complex data so different platforms or dayparts, etc. can be compared.

Marcien Jenckes, President, Advertising at Comcast Cable, has highlighted the impact of Covid and lockdowns on how we shop, how we interact with brands and how we consume media. In all cases, data and personalisation play a bigger role than ever, and with television riding high after record audiences in 2020, Jenckes believes now is the moment to capitalise on these trends by growing the market for addressable TV advertising.

The Future of TV Advertising Global returns on December 8, with the unification of television and digital, connected TV, addressable TV advertising, identity and measurement among the key themes at the three-day conference. In Part One of our event preview, we highlight some of the world-class innovation being showcased by the sell-side, what the buyers are thinking, some of the up-to-date advertising research and fresh thinking that is on the agenda, and the sessions devoted to how we scale addressable TV advertising.

GDPR and the demise of third-party cookies is making audience-based targeting harder, for the industry as a whole. Comscore believes it has the solution, using opted-in panels to understand consumer behaviour and buying signals and then matching this against known media consumption with very granular contextual detail. Advertisers with a target audience can find robust ‘lookalikes’ and forecast where they can find them, buying the media directly or programmatically based on context.

A new Vision Paper argues that a new breed of CDN is needed for telcos to fully monetise 5G and to support the enhanced services and applications that will separate the 5G era from the 4G world, including enhanced video services. It outlines what is needed, starting with virtualisation and pushing the CDN edge closer to users than it has ever been before. There is an opportunity for telcos to monetise their own 5G CDN if they want.

Iris from Synamedia is an important addition to the ad-tech market, providing a comprehensive addressable TV advertising solution for platform operators, BVOD and non-broadcaster OTT. Iris supports dynamic ad insertion for every possible use-case including one-way broadcast networks, and includes a TV-specific DMP to harness viewing insights for targeting. There is a unified campaign manager to track frequency, pacing and delivery against target, and to forecast future targeting opportunities.

Connected TV World Summit opens its digital doors on Wednesday and Thursday and there is still time to register for the free streams. Themes include super-aggregation, better blending of linear with on-demand, the future of content distribution, successful deployment of next-generation TV platforms into multiple territories, and the growing connected TV opportunity for platforms, content owners and advertisers.

It has been a tumultuous year for media. The challenges have included getting television and advertising content produced with social restrictions, understanding consumer sentiment and delivering appropriate advertising when the world is changing every day, and all while introducing entirely new workflows and working practices across the board. Our industry leaders deserve some recognition for dealing with years of structural change in the space of weeks. The newly launched Media Leaders Awards will put them in the spotlight.