Does COVID19 accelerate the shift from Linear TV to Digital/OTT/CTV?
Watch a moment from last week’s live stream with Mary Ann Halford & Benjamin Antier during the Virtual Next TV Summit 🍿
+ Key take aways from our talk below
KEY TAKE AWAYS #fieldnotes
Lots of opportunities in current environment shifting towards CTV.
Connected TV offers control. We know who views a show, when and where and in what context. The second factor is speed. In the current Covid 19 climate, traditional TV has not been able to adjust as quickly. With programmatic, we can change bidding strategy and adapt in real-time. Services that rely more on programmatic adjust better than others with national campaigns on pause. Programmatic gives you control over the way you sell ads which is essential right now. It’s about personalization and discovery and engagement. There’s target-ability so you can start with turning things off or on in one place and later in others.
Will the shift happen overnight? No, but it will happen. Innovation is what everything comes down to. Short term, we may not see much immediate innovation. In times of crisis, people avoid risks and stick with the familiar – the safe. We likely won’t see shifting budgets at an accelerated rate for now. A year from now? Absolutely. Ad dollars always follow viewership and viewers are shifting to Connected TV. Marketers will be forced to follow their audiences and consumers and they will be incentivized to do so.
By the end of the decade, Connected TV will have largely replaced traditional TV. Like phone booths – things just eventually disappear. It’s evolution. CTV is about the quality of content you can provide. It’s cost effective for the consumer. It’s coming your way. You can’t fight against it, but it’s an exciting time for all of us. Opens up the realm of possibilities. There may be some technical challenges but it is heading in the right direction because Connected TV provides the opportunity to do things differently, to do them in the right way with control, metrics and speed.
Programmatic and CTV provides an opportunity for marketers to learn. We all know the famous Wanamaker quote about not knowing which half of our budget is working. Marketing dollars will shift to CTV as programmatic allows us to iterate through different strategies, learn, find out and create attribution in unprecedented ways.
CTV measurement is an opportunity and a challenge. Measurement is extremely important – it has to be solved for the transition from linear to CTV to happen. No one wants to go back to the old way of doing things – running java script code on your webpage to measure things. It’s about server-to-server authentication. “I know this is a real user.” The financial industry has figured out how to make sure a transaction is legit. It’s the same thing. Who needs to be authenticated? Who will be the 3rd party to judge that transaction and make those connections work? Ad inventory becomes more attractive to marketers when it’s easier to measure. It’s that simple.
Thinking of starting a streaming service? Plan and plan again.
It’s a big adventure so you need to plan and think things through. Pick partners you can trust and who will be responsive. There is always unpredictability in launching a new service. Figure out where and how you want to distribute and the technical layers to that. You may want to piggyback on platforms that distribute content with ad supported models. Live streaming, for instance, has technical challenges and is more server intensive so the infrastructure will cost you more.
Stay safe & buckle up for an exciting ride 👩🏽🚀
