Posts for 'Advertising'

Welcome to the 555th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.  

This week we discuss new data from FreeWheel and Nielsen highlighting gains in connected TV usage. Higher usage directly translates to ongoing CTV advertising revenue gains. One example of how this usage translates was a bullish new forecast from MoffettNathanson which pegs YouTube/AVOD ad revenue growing to $53 billion in the U.S. alone by 2025. MN sees a new “mid-top layer” of the traditional marketing funnel emerging that blends the long-form video experience being driven by CTVs with better targeting and conversion.

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A reminder that VideoNuze’s next Connected TV Advertising Summit (Virtual) will be on the afternoons of June 9th and 10th. Registration is complimentary and all attendees will be entered to win a 50-inch Roku TV and Smart Soundbar generously provided by Roku.

CTVs and streaming have become the top priority for content providers of all sizes, as well as advertisers looking to reach younger cord-cutters in particular. The pandemic and proliferation of ad-supported streaming services has driven CTV usage higher; earlier this week FreeWheel reported that 62% of consumption on devices in the second half of 2020 was on CTVs. eMarketer predicts CTV advertising in the U.S. alone will jump to $18.3 billion in 2024, up 61% from 2021.
 
VideoNuze’s 2021 Connected TV Advertising Summit (Virtual) will bring together senior executives from ad buyers, content providers, technology companies and other stakeholders. The two afternoons of high-impact learning will include one-on-one interviews, panel discussions and research presentations with fresh, actionable data. Once again, the CTV Ad Summit will be the most focused, in-depth conference of the year on CTVs and CTV advertising.

If your business success depends on understanding the future of CTV, the CTV Ad Summit is a must-attend event.

Many thanks to our Gold partners Beachfront, Extreme Reach, Mediaocean, Roku and Xandr. To learn more about sponsorship opportunities please contact me.

REGISTER NOW!

Advertising on YouTube and ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) services will grow from approximately $19 billion in 2021 to approximately $53 billion in 2025 in the U.S., a 29% compound annual growth rate, according to a new report from analysts MoffettNathanson. MN sees 67% of the 2025 spending, or approximately $35.5 billion, going to YouTube alone, with other AVOD providers splitting the remaining 33% or $17.5 billion, just about how spending is allocated currently.

MN characterizes the YouTube/AVOD ad spending as a new “mid-top layer” of the traditional marketing funnel, sitting below top-of-funnel brand advertising traditionally dominated by TV spending which MN forecasts will stay roughly flat by 2025 at around $70 billion. It sees total top-of-funnel spending declining from $108 billion in 2021 to around $99 billion in 2025. Below the YouTube/AVOD layer is middle-of-the-funnel digital/social media (except search) which will increase from an estimated $64 billion in 2021 to an estimated $137 billion in 2025, a 21% CAGR.

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Connected TVs accounted for 62% of ad views on devices in the second half of 2020 according to the latest version of FreeWheel’s U.S. Video Marketplace Report, up from 50% in the first half of 2020. However, FreeWheel reclassified ad views from IP apps on pay-TV operators’ set-top boxes to be included in CTVs for the first time. FreeWheel didn’t break out the number or percent these views accounted for.

The reclassification contributed to STB ad views declining from 23% in H1 ’20 to 14% in H2 ’20. The combination of CTV and STB increased from 73% of ad views in H1 ’20 to 76% in H2 ’20. Desktop increased from 11% to 16% of ad views during the period while mobile declined from 15% to 8%.

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Global programmatic CTV ad spending increased 2.2x from Q1 ’20 to Q4 ’20, according to the new CTV Ad Supply Trends Report from Pixalate, an ad fraud and marketing compliance platform. Pixalate estimates that 78% of U.S. households were reachable with programmatic CTV ads in Q4 ’20, up from 50% in Q4 ’19.  Separate, eMarketer has said that programmatic CTV ad spending in the U.S. was $4.36 billion in 2020 and will jump to $6.73 billion in 2021.

Geographically, Latin America experienced the fastest growth in programmatic CTV ad spending in 2020, up 317% from Q1 to Q4. North America was next (up 123%), followed by Asia-Pacific (up 106%) and EMEA (up 56%).

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At its ONE21 developer conference this morning, NBCUniversal announced plans to launch its NBCU Audience insights Hub, which will contain all of its first-party audience data. The “proprietary data clean room” will give authorized partners permission to run restricted queries across their and NBCU’s audience data without exposing users’ personally identifiable information.

Using the NBCU data, partners will be able to discover overlaps in their audiences to drive better targeting and cross-platform campaign planning. Partners will gain access to NBCU’s linear TV APIs and certified reach measurement models to improve efficiency and effectiveness. NBCU plans to add to its measurement capabilities so that partners can do their own self-service multi-platform attribution. The clean room framework is being powered by Snowflake and VideoAmp is the first measurement partner to be integrated.

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Back in December, 2019, before the pandemic upended everything, I speculated that Netflix would launch an ad-supported tier in 2020. Subscriber growth in the U.S. was slowing in 2019 and there was reason to believe that in Q1 ’20 Netflix might lose subscribers in its UCAN (U.S. + Canada) region.

A lower-priced ad-supported tier would have multiple benefits: reducing churn, revenue growth/diversification by tapping into the white hot connected TV ad market, a way to compete with new lower-priced streaming entrants, new growth story for investors, etc. The key challenge was that Netflix had for years said it had no interest in an ad-supported tier; it wanted to stick to its ad-free brand identity and user experience.

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More than 120 million U.S. viewers streamed YouTube or YouTube TV on a connected TV last December, according to a blog post yesterday from Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer. That’s up from 100 million per month that YouTube last revealed in June, 2020 at its Brandcast presentation during the NewFronts. Mohan reiterated that while mobile is still the most popular way to consume YouTube content, CTV is the fastest-growing.

Mohan also said that in December over 25% of logged-in YouTube CTV viewers in the U.S. watched over 90% of their YouTube content on CTV.  Mohan quoted comScore data that 41% of all ad-supported streaming watch time occurs on YouTube, which makes YouTube by far the biggest CTV player.

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Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) has integrated technology from ad server Flashtalking via API which will help streamline work flows and campaign optimization across linear and online video. Integrating with the CTS Ad Management Platform will centralize linear and online video creative management. Richard Nunn, VP/GM of Advertiser Solutions at CTS said in a briefing that the integration would provide insights on the performance of campaign creative in online video channels to drive greater ad personalization in linear viewing.

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Welcome to the 551st edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Vizio filed to go public this week and it’s looking to take a page out of Roku’s playbook. Vizio’s business is dominated by sales of TV sets today, but it wants to ramp up its Platform Plus segment which includes its advertising and data business. Colin and I discuss the opportunity and also what challenges Vizio will face (note, this is not investment advice).

Switching topics, discovery+ accounted for 19% of SVOD signups in the U.S. in January, marking a very strong start for the new streaming service. Looking ahead, we explore whether discovery+ will be able to maintain this pace, and also retain these new subscribers.
 

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Music video network Vevo has chosen ad measurement provider iSpot to quantify connected TV audiences and authenticate the incremental reach of advertisers’ campaigns running on Vevo. CTV has been a major source of growth for Vevo with viewership up 30% globally and up 58% in the U.S. in 2020.

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Crackle Plus is expanding its relationship with video supply-side platform SpotX to help monetize new distribution across a variety of free ad-supported streaming TV (“FAST”) services, the companies announced this morning. Crackle Plus is now available on 29 devices and services and has announced deals with fuboTV, Philo, VIDAA, VIZIO and Xumo which it estimates will expose Crackle Plus networks to over 60 million new viewers in 2021.

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If you’re looking to better understand the underlying challenges of unifying buying and selling video advertising across linear TV and streaming TV, FreeWheel released a valuable report last week called “The Definitive Guide to Unified Video.”

The report is especially timely as the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of streaming and linear ratings continue to fall. As a result, advertisers are working harder to build effective campaigns, especially those that can reach younger audiences. TV networks are adapting by delivering their content directly to audiences through digital services, often with ad support. Linear will continue to be a sizable though shrinking part of the viewership pie over time, while streaming will increase. So figuring out how to unify buying and selling across the two during the transition period and beyond is critically important.

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Video ad impressions by device were redistributed in 2020 vs 2019 according to Extreme Reach’s new Video Benchmarks Report which is based on ad serving data from the company’s AdBridge platform. The biggest changes included video ad impressions on desktop increasing from 16% share in 2019 to 22% share in 2020, while video ad impressions on CTVs dropped from 49% share in 2019 to 38% share in 2020. ER said the redistribution occurred as “work from home became the norm” due to the pandemic.

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Last Thursday’s Q4 and 2020 earnings reports from The Trade Desk and Roku provide further evidence of connected TV advertising’s surge and also viewers’ significant adoption of streaming video. Because the two companies are heavily invested in connected TV advertising and provide lots of thoughtful insights on their earnings calls (transcripts here and here), their results and sentiments are valuable in gauging the state of the market. Together they provide a holistic picture of the market since The Trade Desk operates on the demand side and Roku on the supply side (primarily).

For some time, The Trade Desk has talked about the rising importance of CTV advertising on its overall business, which continued this quarter with the pandemic accelerating key trends. Founder and CEO Jeff Green said that advertisers’ CTV spending on the platform more than doubled in 2020 (total spend, including CTV, was $4.2 billion with Q4 revenue up 48% to $320 million). Green said “more than 1,000 brands spend at least $100,000 on CTV on our platform” and that “those brands spending more than $1 million on our platform in 2020 more than doubled from a year ago.”

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Welcome to the 549th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

On this week’s podcast, Colin and I dig into Roku’s strong Q4 and full year 2020 results which were reported yesterday. As has been the case for the past several years, “platform” revenue, which includes Roku’s advertising business, led the way. Platform revenue reached  $471.2 million in the quarter, up 81% year-over-year. The Roku Channel was another bright spot for the company in Q4, with 175 ad-supported virtual linear channels now included.

We discuss these and other topics, including whether Roku’s interest in original content could cause conflicts with existing content partners.

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Wurl posted record results in 2020, powering free streaming linear TV channels to a variety of popular connected TVs (what Wurl calls its “Wurl Network”). Wurl launched 539 channels in 2020, including 220 in Q4 alone. It now delivers over 700 channels from approximately 150 different content producers and TV networks.

Wurl’s channel model demonstrates that despite all of the attention paid to SVOD viewership (e.g. Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc.), consumption isn’t monolithic; in fact viewers often still crave free, lean-back, programmed TV experiences where they can press play once and then sit back and enjoy. Industry analysts have sometimes called these channels “virtual linear” or “free ad-supported TV” (FAST).

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Last week Alphabet reported that YouTube's global ad revenues hit a record $6.9 billion in Q4 '20, up 47% from Q4 '19. For perspective on YouTube's and the market's growth, I interviewed Brian Atwood, who was just appointed Pixability's new Chief Revenue Officer. If you're not familiar with Pixability, it provides software and insights for video ad buyers to target and optimize their campaigns on YouTube, YouTube on connected TVs, Amazon Fire and Roku. It also just had a record year of growth and profitability.

VideoNuze: Congratulations on joining Pixability. What excited you about the company?

Brian Atwood: I’ve been working in the YouTube and Connected TV space for over four years now and I have always been impressed with Pixability’s unique targeting solutions, performance optimization and insights. I feel like there is no company better positioned to help brands and agencies navigate the big shifts we’re seeing in the market. More than anything, I’m looking forward to working with the people. They’ve assembled an outstanding team that is incredibly well respected in the industry.

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